Ghost in the Wire

The recent kerfuffle about the New York Times' reporting on the SWIFT program, the now famous program through which our government tracks financial flows in an effort to stem terrorist funding, seems a bit, well, exaggerated. As far as I can tell from what I've read thus far, SWIFT has been in the news before, the government has routinely talked about tracking money flows and financial surveillance, and the terrorists would need to be ultra-stupid to not think that a program like SWIFT was being used to suss out abnormal or suspicious financial activity. In terms of real effects, then, the revelation by the New York Times does not seem as if it should have a substantially negative impact on our ability to fight would-be terrorism. Maybe it does, but thus far, the case has not been made particularly well.

This, of course, will not prevent the administration and its conservative supporters from having a political field day knocking the New York TImes (and other media outlets) for their left-wing, terror-supporting agenda. Nor will it stop the mainstream media from having one of their standard dramaturgies, wherein they spend their time acting out their fantasies of scandal and controversy amidst camera lights and planned witticisms. And the New York Times will defend themselves, debates will ensue over journalistic standards during wartime, blogger ethics panels will be convened, and the issue will slowly fade with a wink and a nod, the New York Times having theoretically confirmed that the Gray Lady still has some journalistic gumption after all and the Republican leadership having theoretically demonstrated that they really care about the War on Terror, dammit, that liberal journalists don't, and so on. One cannot help but feel that there exists a collusion between these two forces, a game wherein both parties know they're mugging for the cameras but neither party wants to call the other out, for fear that the public might catch on to the whole charade.

One of the fundamental difficulties - perhaps the fundamental difficulty - confronting the human sciences today is undoubtedly that of interpretation. From whence and how can a thinker understand a text, an event, an object, or a discourse? From whence and how can that understanding be communicated? What assumptions are required to make sense of that interpretation? The splits that we see at work between so-called modernists and postmodernists, between Lacanians and Deleuzians, between all manner of methodological beasts, are in large part not splits caused by differences in reading for meaning, but rather differences in the methods by which interpretation and the subsequent production of meaning is possible. In other words, the theoretical assumptions that inform the interpretation determine the possibilities and final form that any interpretation will take.

I am, of course, not saying anything new. Gadamer called it "historically effected consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), the idea that one's ability to interpret is always already bound up with one's experience of language, wherein experience is structured by the conditions in and through which one experiences their being-in-the-world. For academics (broadly construed), trained in certain methodological proclivities, these theoretical frames shape the experience of a critical object, just as a reader's life experiences will shape their appreciation and understanding of a text. Gadamer is expanding on Heidegger's fundamental concern with the primacy of language, the so-called "house of Being," trying to explain the ways in which language structures experience and interpretation before experience and interpretation can take place. Gadamer even spends the closing chapters of Truth and Method trying to explain how verbal and written languages implicate differences in interpretive possibilities and thus help to explain the essence of hermeneutics, just as Heidegger spent his closing years lecturing on the dangerous differences between technological and poetic language.

This attention to the mediated structure of language is instructive, and at least hints at the importance that such mediations have in determining our historically effected consciousness, and thus their importance in determining the possibilities of interpretation. We know this. We know that television is different from cinema is different from a novel is different from a conversation. But the nature of this difference, and the role that it should play in shaping critical possibilities and theoretical frameworks remains murky.

It remains murky because, methods and perspectives and concepts being what they are, and the academic game of competitive publishing and productivity being what it is, a genetic privilege asserts itself in the act of interpretation, one that largely bypasses the hermeneutical concern about the discursive part and the mediated whole. Mostly for polemical reasons, I want to take as a case study the critical lens of psychoanalysis, wherein certain psychoanalytic frames (desire, the Real, the symptom, etc.) come to explain the meaning and import of whatever discourse or event is under consideration. The genetic privilege, just to make this obvious, comes from believing that, underlying the significance and/or formation of a particular discourse, there exists some psychic structure that can be explained by psychoanalysis. So an architectural discourse about Huey Long can be explained by recourse to hysteria, and the meaning of and discursive deployment of 9-11 can be explained by recourse to desire.* These things come to mean, the privilege tells us, because of concepts and critical tools provided to us through the language of pyschoanalysis, or put another way, psychoanalysis helps us to make sense of the world by explaining the structures that animate it.

But what if there are no underlying psychic structures? Or what if psychoanalysis got them wrong? Those are generic and oft-asked questions, and I have little interest in exploring them here, other than to say that these two question indict the validity of psychoanalysis independently of its genetic privilege, which is to say that they leave the question of interpetation's epigenesis untouched, and instead simply defer or defuse a particular expository frame. But what if we instead reversed the genetic privilege, and entertained the belief that psychoanalysis does not explain discourse or meaning or representation, but rather that these things explain psychoanalysis? More specifically, what if the Lacanian symbolic is the constitutive force of psychoanalysis rather than its taxonomic "discovery?" What if the theoretical frame that purports to explain the symptom is in actuality a symptom itself, generated by the problem of the sign and of representation, rather than the means by which the sign and representation are to be understood?

The Internet has been lacking in English translations of Kierkegaard's work for quite some time. No longer. I happily link to Dr. Anthony Storm's Kierkegaard site.

Italy over France, 2:1, first overtime.

Zidane will not score, but will still play a beautiful final game.

Update: I was very, very wrong, except for calling it for Italia.

My partner and I watched the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man the other night. A brief summary for those unaware of the film: a man (Tim Treadwell) decides to live among giant, brown grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska, and does so for 13 summers, imagining himself as protector of and friend to the bears; during the last five summers he begins to video his encounters with the bears (and foxes), becoming increasingly cinematic in his efforts and developing a new, on-film persona; eventually, he and his girlfriend are attacked and eaten by a particularly aggressive and hungry bear.

Herzog, with his pronounced need for profundity, treats everything in the story with a heavy hand, directing interviews with those who knew Treadwell with all the delicacy of a broadsword. Speaking to a friend and former girlfriend (from years back), he asks: "Do you feel like Tim's widow?" Shocked by the question, but enjoying the camera, she pauses a bit before answering in the affirmative. The coroner narrates his findings as if the entire thing has been scripted and rehearsed twenty times, and Herzog even lets the camera roll a little longer, catching the scripted "unscripted" moment when the coroner lapses into thought. And then there's the horribly awkward moment when Tim's still-ticking watch, which is found on his severed arm (the rest of it having been eaten, clothing and all, by said bear), is passed on to Tim's promptedly self-proclaimed widow.

But nothing quite prepares one for the moment when Herzog himself enters the open frame of the camera, head turned away from the lens and towards Tim's "widow," who sits with a video camera in her lap, out of which snakes an audio cord that works its way up to headphones covering Herzog's ears. Herzog is listening to the audio of Tim's (and his actual girlfriend's) final moments, with the two of them moaning and screaming as the bear rips flesh from bone. Herzog is nice enough to narrate: "I hear Tim moaning. He's telling her, run away, run away." I'm sure the tape is nauseatingly traumatic. I'm sure everyone can imagine just how nauseating and traumatic it is. But Herzog apparently thinks that he needs to beat us over the head with it, telling the widow: "You must never listen to this tape. Never." Even better, he tells her she must destroy it, or else it will be the "white elephant" in her room (I think he just meant "elephant" in the room, but whatever.)

This is exactly the sort of thing that bugs me about Herzog's films, this almost compulsive desire he has to maximize the aura of whatever the object in question - an audio tape or an image. It is as if every film is an attempt to urinate on Benjamin's famous account of aura's death, and to film that urination with unbearable scrutiny, preferably on the top of a mountain never before climbed, while as of yet unclassified animals watch silently in the backdrop. Destroy the audio and the audio's trauma remains untouchable by the audience, and thus unpassable, the ultimate apotheosis of its cinematic debut. It is there without being there, and as such the audience can only experience its horror as Herzog's horror, thus transferring the power of the object of the film to the film itself.

This leads me to my other gripe with the film. Herzog believes that Treadwell's death comes about in part because of Treadwell's desire to escape the chaos of the human world for the simplicity of the animal world. This won't work, Herzog informs us with all the gentleness and nuance of a dropped piano, because the world isn't structured by simplicity and order but rather by chaos, complexity, and murder. Binary thinking notwithstanding, there is a pretty fundamental flaw in Herzog's interpretation of Treadwell's films and diaries, namely: if the man wants to escape the human world so badly, why is he transcribing his thoughts and experiences in ink and in film? Why is he so concerned with reproducing his experiences with the assumptions that others will read or view his reproductions? This is a different question, but it's a question that's far more interesting than the ones Herzog is trying to get to with the film. But it's a question that would also have forced Herzog to ask what in the world he gets out of his film, this film in particular. Maybe had he pursued an answer to this question, he wouldn't need to beat his audience over the head repeatedly with the supposed profundities of his other queries.

All that being said, it's worth watching the movie. Not because of Herzog and the eye-rolling that will accompany much of his commentary, but because of the utterly fascinating movies left behind by Treadwell (over 100 hours of film), which Herzog does supply in good measure, and which will provide much - please forgive this - to chew on.

With the news that Wal-Mart will begin providing organic food for prices only 10% higher than the conventional food they already offer, environmentalists and organic advocates have begun to worry. Wal-Mart's ruthless business practices, and their desire to suppress prices by any means necessary, will likely mean that organic produce will be gown overseas using cheap labor and non-sustainable, monocultural farming techniques. This is an entirely legitimate concern, and along with a host of other, well-document reasons, means I won't be purchasing my organic produce from Wal-Mart any time soon.

Nevertheless, these concerns should not obscure an important component of the story: namely, that the dilution of "organic" is a mark of its success, not a sign of its immanent failure. As with any brand, its ability to spread is predicated not upon the rigidity of its symbolization but rather the desirability of its identity. As a supplemental brand identity, "organic" works because people who care about the health value of their food or the environmental consequences of its production choose to pay extra or to shop elsewhere in order to support it. Once this support pushes the organic market beyond a certain level of success, companies who normally wouldn't give one organic fig about the agricultural proccesses that produce their food suddenly hope to jump on the bandwagon and garner themselves a bit of the market share. Certainly there are reasons to be worried about Wal-Mart's particular bandwagon jump; as provider of 27% of America's food, their market share will have a considerable impact, and with that the ability to possibly reshape the meaning of organic.

From Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu:

The Great Teaching is basically quite ordinairy. It is easy to enter for those with sharp facilities and quick wits and broad penetration who don't use their intellectual brilliance to try to comprehend it.

Next, from Suzuki Roshi's Not Always So:

Intellectual understanding is necessary, but it will not complete your study. This does not mean to ignore intellectual understanding, or that enlightenment is entirely different from intellectual understanding. The true, direct experience of things can be intellectualized, and this conceptual explanation may help you have direct experience. Both intellectual understanding and direct experiece are necessary, but it is important to know the difference.

Finally, from Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace:

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to trasncend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth. The technique is to release. The Buddhist way of understanding is always letting go of our views and knowledge in order to transcend.

Buddhism teaches that suffering is caused by our own attachment to the world. I want to update this by noting that suffering is in fact caused by our attachment to the word, more specifically, Microsoft Word. Even more specificaly, Microsoft Word attachments in email. And so, thinking of your enlightenment like any Bodhisattva should, I present you with Tristan Miller's "Please don't send me Microsoft Word attachments."

Live long and prosper, Open Office.

Metta, a Pali word that means loving-kindness, is a concept in Buddhism that incorporates gentleness, friendship, honesty, and non-violence, among other concepts. Metta (in Sanskrit, Maitri) founds bell hooks' politics of love (she is a Buddhist, after all), and is not unlike Derrida's unconditional hospitality. After more than two millennia of metaphysics, and after at least a half century of pataphysics, maybe the time for mettaphysics has finally arrived.

I don't know. I used to believe that these politics of love arguments were, to be frank, a bunch of crap. Love is not a solution; antagonism is. One cannot simply be open to the other that wishes you harm, and one cannot simply embrace a mood - love - in the absence of an identifiable object. The idea that a politics could be grounded on a notion of loving-kindness always struck me as some sort of elision. The world is in ruins, fear not, we shall turn to love! I imagined it a throwback to an era of 60s radicals, thinking that perhaps the impetus behind their pro-consumer free love and expression days was simply being transformed in a last ditch effort to save their "love" from historical condemnation. Maybe it is. I think Michael Hardt is basically full of it, and I remain unconvinced by much of hooks' claims.

But I find myself increasingly persuaded by the idea that resistance and change begins with Metta. Not necessarily a politics of metta, a politics of love - I remain somewhat unconvinced as to that - but a political of metta, a mettaphysic, that structures how we negotiate the countours of the political? That's a different kettle of fish all together.

This was originally posted over at Long Sunday, and I'll leave any comments for over there, but I wanted to reproduce it here.

A funny thing happened on my way to a contribution. I found I had nothing to say. I thought I had something to say, but it turns out - this shouldn't come as a surprise - that nope, not a thing of value. I read what had already been posted and was struck by how different were the conceptualizations of democracy being put forward. So, in a very short post, I tried to hint at the notion that perhaps democracy is precisely the form of government or subject of government that corresponds best to contesting its content. But I also offered an afterthought, that perhaps democracy is the form of government that best maintains the hyphen seen in the ethico-political. Adam insightfully suggested that these were indeed the same definition, something that I think is true, more or less.

It's worth exploring this definitional co-identity further, but before I do so, I want to offer some context. And so, contrary to my normal giddy theoreticism, I want to try some personal backstory.