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Revenant Of Deconstruction

2006-12-19T09:41:00.000Z

Derrida On 'Ghostly Hauntings' ... And Kafka's 'Ghost'

'The Science Of Ghosts' - Derrida In 'Ghost Dance'

Presence Is Always Divided

On The Problematics Of Deconstruction

2006-11-12T06:16:00.000Z

The Image, The Film-Maker, His Cow, And Her Cheese [INLAND EMPIRE]

"Without cheese there wouldn't be an INLAND EMPIRE." [Short Video]

[The two guys who made/accidentally-captured this 2-minute video - of Lynch in a suitably bizarre "performance art" promotion of his latest film on a Hollywood sidewalk - sound like the two guys from the Black-Book office scene/massacre in Lynch's Mulholland Dr ...].

Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, this DV-shot, 3-hour oneiric epic has been rhizomatically percolating ever so slowly but surely.

"EVEN by David Lynch’s weird standards his latest thriller is an exasperating stretch. For three chilly hours we shadow a small cast of artists and prostitutes as their identities are deliberately blurred in one of the most impenetrable films ever made ... The character played by Jeremy Irons is trying to shoot a psychological drama about love and terror in some sort of crazy labyrinth but there’s something deeply wrong with his script. "

"David Lynch's latest opus is a Russian doll of a film with stories inside stories inside stories. But coming in at three hours long, made in Poland and Hollywood, the digitally-shot film is inspired and incomprehensible by turns ... Laura Dern (who also co-produced) stars as an actress who has just landed a part in a new film. What the producers have neglected to tell her is that the movie is a remake and that the two original leads were murdered. Now, history looks set to repeat itself. "

"There is a very clean divide in Mulholland Drive between a woman's dreams and waking life, but the walls between the two are completely dissolved in the more fragmentary Inland Empire, Lynch's most self-reflexive creation to date. The director has vowed never to work on film again, and for this, his first feature shot on digital video, he lobs a cherry bomb at his entire canon, recording the jagged remnants that resonate from the blast as they slide and dissipate into the swirl of his projector beam. Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders. "

"You may ask what the film's stream of non sequiturs, anecdotes, clues, doublings, folktales, and psychotic episodes mean. We could say nothing and declare that Inland Empire doesn't so much fall into the abyss as it resides in it, telegraphing dizzying sounds and visions from its drowned world toward the outside, which should suffice as an explanation if you've learned to respect the fact that Lynch carves his films much closer to where our id resides than anyone has ever dared. Lynch, more honestly than Godard, embraces the dark and dingy contours of the DV format ..."

Can't wait ...

See also this excellent review over at American Stranger.

The Gramophone's Technological Uncanny

2006-11-01T18:32:00.000Z

" The time is out of joint. Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo [hinge of the door, the semantic root of "cardinal" numbers], in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. [ . . .] Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it." (Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, vii, 1963).

Further to Mark K-Punk's continuing investigation of sonic hauntology, phonograph blues and the technological uncanny:

Starting From Scratch: Remembering the Gramophone in Literature, Music, and Film

Remembering White Noise: R. M. Rilkes Gramatophonocentrism

Bram Ieven

This paper introduces the general topic of the session, memories of the gramophone in other media and in the arts. To do so, I first introduce a theoretical apparatus that might help to circumscribe the phenomenon at hand. I argue that the grammatology Derrida developed in the sixties shows traces of the gramophone and that this theory itself can be mobilized again to conceptualize the gramophone as a medium for storing information (technical memory). Derrida, I argue, was himself influenced by the paradigm of material inscription that was set out by the gramophone, which clearly shows in his definition of the grammè as the material inscription that destroys the possibility of direct experience but at the same time makes sensation possible. (Derrida 1967: 19-20) Derridas critique of phonocentrism, which is based on his theory of the grammè and the trace, is redefined by Friedrich Kittler as an ascendant of the gramophone: The trace of all writing, this trace of pure difference, is simply the needle of a gramophone. (Kittler 1986: 55)

Having introduced the theoretical apparatus, I turn to a concrete example of the remediation of the gramophone: the remediation of white noise in Rainer Maria Rilkes work. Reflecting on the classes in anatomy he attended in Paris, Rilke describes how he was struck by the meandering seam that crosses the crown of the scull. To him this seam looked as if it was drawn by the needle of a gramophone, and a primal noise (Ur-Gerausch) could perhaps be heard if a needle would scratch over the seam. (Rilke, in Kittler 1986: 66) Rilkes reflection is emblematic for how the gramophone found its way into the arts in general, and into literature in specific. I will trace the influence of white noise in Rilkes work, with specific attention for his short text on primal noise and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.

"You Aint Seen Nothing Yet": The Voice as Object in Early Sound Cinema

Yasco Horsman

This paper discusses the intrusion of the voice in the two first commercially released sound films: The Jazz Singer (1927), a musical starring singer Al Jolson, and a Mickey Mouse short, Steamboat Willy (1928), which was marketed as the first animated cartoon with sound. Both films are highly self-conscious in the way they employ the new technology of sound cinema. The story-lines of both Steamboat Willy and the Jazz Singer revolve around the voice. In both cases, the voice is not so much an organ of speech but is first and foremost used for singing, an activity which is presented as slightly obscene and invested with an enjoyment that is rather anti-social. My paper points to the fact that the preoccupation with this singing voice leads both films to make a similar visual pun in which the voice is depicted visually as an object that has a certain autonomy with regard to the singing subject. This object becomes a puncture that threatens to unravel the texture of the cinematic text (in The Jazz Singer) or a blur that distorts the film anamorphotically (in Steamboat Willy). I argue that these crucial scenes in both films point to the scandal of the gramophone, an uncanniness that is at the heart of this technology, and perhaps surprisingly- suggest that cinema had relied on the very dumbness of its silent phase for its coherence. The remediation of the gramophone in early sound film, then, is revealing with regard to both media.

The Original Scratch: Hip Hop Scratch Techniques in Between Art and Medium

Jan Hein Hoogstad

Although Thomas Edison primarily developed the gramophone as a medium to store and transmit human speech, it was also used to record music from the start. Nonetheless, this technical device first acquired its real musical potential with subsequent inventions. The first of these shifts was the introduction of multi-track recording technology. The recording now no longer necessarily maintained a mimetic relation to the recording session, but is changed into a complex sonic landscape of voices, sounds and other noises. The same argument can also be applied to the concept of time. Multi-track recording should be conceived as an event that breaks the mimetic relation between the temporal structure of the original and the copy. As a result, a gramophone record is not marked by a unidirectional temporal motion, but forms a temporal patchwork of different time tracks.

The technique of scratching as developed by New York hip-hop DJs at the end of the 1970s marks a second shift in the history of the gramophone. The scratch changes the record player from a recording device into a musical instrument with its own distinctive sound. Because this sound is unique, it quickly became a source of recording itself. In other words, with the invention of the scratch the gramophone simultaneously completed the circle and made a new beginning.

When we look closer at what a scratch exactly is, we will notice that it is marked by the same paradoxical movement as its invention as such. The scratch is at the same time a jump back in time and a new beginning. Although this temporal movement is a disposition of the gramophone as such, it cannot be conceived from an intermedial perspective. The scratch can only be initiated by an external rather than a transcendent actor. In my presentation I want to develop scratching with Heideggers concept of Ursprung (origin, but literally primordial jump). As opposed to Ursprung, however, the scratch does not go back to a single origin. Because the vinyl has become a temporal patchwork, the scratch can go back to multiple beginnings. For that reason, the scratch not only transforms a technical device into a musical instrument, it is also a cultural technique that manipulates the course of time.

Intellipedia: Gov't unveils a Wikipedia for spies

2006-11-01T09:20:00.000Z

Analysts can add and edit content on government's classified Web site

Updated: 6:53 p.m. ET Oct. 31, 2006

WASHINGTON - The U.S. intelligence community Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage.

The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web.

A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for "secret" and "sensitive but unclassified" material.

The system is also available to the Transportation Security Administration and national laboratories.

Intellipedia is currently being used to assemble a major intelligence report, known as a national intelligence estimate, on Nigeria as well as the State Department's annual country reports on terrorism, officials said.

Some day it may also be the path intelligence officials take to produce the president's daily intelligence briefing.

But the system, which makes data available to thousands of users who would not see it otherwise, has also stirred qualms about potential security lapses following the recent media leak of a national intelligence estimate that caused a political uproar by identifying Iraq as a contributor to the growth of global terrorism.

"We're taking a risk," acknowledged Michael Wertheimer, the intelligence community's chief technical officer. "There's a risk it's going to show up in the media, that it'll be leaked."

Intelligence officials say the format is perfect for sharing information between agencies, a centerpiece of the reform legislation that established Negroponte's office as national intelligence director after the Sept. 11 attacks.

They also said it could lead to more accurate intelligence reports because the system allows a wider range of officials to scrutinize material and keeps a complete, permanent record of individual contributions including dissenting points of view.

That might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials are so enthusiastic about Intellipedia that they plan to provide access to Britain, Canada and Australia.

Even China could be granted access to help produce an unclassified intelligence estimate on the worldwide threat posed by infectious diseases.

"We'd hope to get down to the doctor in Shanghai who may have a useful contribution on avian flu," senior intelligence analyst Fred Hassani said.

---------------------------------------------

Wikipedia's entry for Intellipedia: Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ...

More detailed, in-depth information and analysis about Intellipedia is accessible from this dedicated Intellipedia Blog.

"A gift from the CIA. These shovels are the equivalent of Meatball / Wikipedia BarnStars, except they award both virtual and real shovels (for gardening Intellipedia, the intelligence community's Wiki)."---Eekin, who claims to be the first person outside of the intelligence community to receive one of these shovels

"The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community." --------Original proposal for Intellipedia presented by D. Calvin Andrus, Chief Technology Officer, CIA Center For Mission Information, April, 2006.

At CIA, we have created nearly 500 internal blogs in

CIAs Office of Iraqi Analysis are devoting time to assembling what they know into a collection of wiki pages, collectively know as the Intellipedia. ...

US Fascism: Local Comfort, European Neutrality

2006-10-19T03:39:00.000+01:00

Legal Defence now a serious crime in comfortably fascist US:

Stewart in Leg-irons; the latest victory in the war on terror

By Mike Whitney

10/17/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- "She has represented the poor, the disadvantaged and the unpopular ... It is no exaggeration to say that Ms. Stewart performed a public service not only to her clients but her nation." Judge John G. Koeltl; Federal District Court, Manhattan, NY.

So far, Bush's only triumph in his muddled war on terror has been locking up the two Stewart Sisters, Lynne and Martha. (They're not really sisters) Neither posed any threat to national security, but that's beside the point. Their arrest sends a chilling message to "home-decoration mavens" and 67 year old cancer patients that they'd better "watch their step" or they'll find themselves in prison-pinstripes.

Do Americans really see how crazy this is or have we been so subsumed in "terror-hysteria" that we've lost our sense of humor altogether?

Consider this: while attorney Stewart is tottering off to prison for defending a "blind Sheik", a tan and rested Bin Laden is somewhere in the Pakistan-outback working on golf swing and his memoirs?

Does that make any sense?

Only if the real objective is to intimidate lawyers who defend unpopular clients rather than nailing terrorists.

Bush's contempt for leftists far exceeds his dubious desire to rid the world of terrorism. That's why the country's energies are so misdirected and doomed to failure.

Sure, his cohorts, the uber-nationalists, eat-it-up. That's why the right-wing blogs are all atwitter with the news of Bush's "Big Catch" in the GWOT. According to the loonies on the right, "Terrorist Kingpin" Stewart is guilty of everything except steering the planes into the buildings.

Pathetic.

Bilious Bill O'Reilly and his ilk will probably follow up with their typical scathing attack on civil liberties organizations, those pedophile-defending Stalinist pornographers. If we took O'Reilly's advice we'd empty Guantanamo right now to make room for any card-carrying member of the ACLU. The only way to keep America free is by eliminating the people who defend freedom.

How logical is that?

Imagine if we really took terrorism seriously? What if we withdrew the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, shut down Bush's gulag in Guantanamo, stopped killing Arabs in their own countries, and recognized that "Islamo-fascism" is a clever public-relations buzzword intended to incite hatred of Muslims?

How long would it be before the "global threat of terrorism" would shrivel and die on the vine?

Three weeks ago, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was leaked to the New York Times. The report laid out the findings of the 16 American intelligence agencies, which "unanimously" agreed that Iraq was producing a new generation of terrorists and making the American people "less safe".

What a surprise.

Lynne Stewart's name was not in the report, but George Bush's featured rather prominently. Bush has incited more terrorism than any person in the grim history of the planet, and now, the 16 preeminent intel-agencies have confirmed that very point.

If we're serious about terrorism, we have to do something about the people who are creating it; Bush and Cheney. 5 years after 9-11, it's not enough to say "At least we got Martha Stewart and her 67-year old namesake off the streets."

Note: Lynne Stewart received a 28-month sentence, but is now free on bail pending appeal.

===================================

Meanwhile, those in neutral-fantazising Europe resisting US-UK terrorism are treated as "common criminals" while delivering suspended pronouncements about their "criminal sentences."

The courts are starting to accept that the war against Iraq is a crime

In Britain and Ireland, protesters who have deliberately damaged military equipment are walking from the dock

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 17, 2006
The Guardian

In the early hours, two days before the attack on Iraq began, two men in their 30s, Phil Pritchard and Toby Olditch, cut through the fence surrounding the air base at Fairford in Gloucestershire and made their way towards the B52 bombers which were stationed there. The planes belonged to the US air force. The trespassers were caught by guards and found to be carrying tools and paint. They confessed that they were seeking to disable the planes, in order to prevent war crimes from being committed. This year they were tried on charges of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Last week, after long deliberations, the jury failed to reach a verdict.

The same thing happened a month ago. Two other activists, Margaret Jones and Paul Milling, had entered the same RAF base and smashed up more than 20 of the vehicles used to load bombs on to the B52s. The charges were the same, and again the jury failed to agree. In both cases the defendants claimed to be putting the state on trial. If I were in government, I would be starting to feel uneasy.

The defendants had tried to argue in court that the entire war against Iraq was a crime of aggression. But in March this year the law lords ruled that they could not use this defence: while aggression by the state is a crime under international law, it is not a crime under domestic law. But they were allowed to show that they were seeking to prevent specific war crimes from being committed - principally, the release by the B52s of cluster bombs and munitions tipped with depleted uranium.

They cited section 5 of the 1971 Criminal Damage Act, which provides lawful excuse for damaging property if that action prevents property belonging to other people from being damaged, and section 3 of the 1967 Criminal Law Act, which states that "a person may use such force as is reasonable in the prevention of a crime". In summing up, the judge told the jurors that using weapons "with an adverse effect on civilian populations which is disproportionate to the need to achieve the military objective" is a war crime. The defendants are likely to be tried again next year.

While these non-verdicts are as far as the defence of lawful excuse for impeding the Iraq war has progressed in the UK, in Ireland and Germany the courts have made decisions - scarcely reported over here - whose implications are momentous. Last year, five peace campaigners were acquitted after using an axe and hammers to cause $2.5m worth of damage to a plane belonging to the US navy. When they attacked it, in February 2003, it had been refuelling at Shannon airport on its way to Kuwait, where it would deliver supplies to be used in the impending war. The jury decided that the five saboteurs were acting lawfully.

This summer, the German federal administrative court threw out the charge of insubordination against a major in the German army. He had refused to obey an order which, he believed, would implicate him in the invasion of Iraq. The judges determined that the UN charter permits a state to go to war in only two circumstances: in self-defence, and when it has been authorised to do so by the UN security council. The states attacking Iraq, they ruled, had no such licence. Resolution 1441, which was used by the British and US governments to justify the invasion, contained no authorisation. The war could be considered an act of aggression.

There is no prospect that the British prime minister could be put on trial for war crimes in this country (although, as the international lawyer Philippe Sands points out, there is a chance that he could be arrested and tried elsewhere). Even so, the government appears to find these legal processes profoundly threatening.

When the Fairford protesters took their request to challenge the legality of the war to the court of appeal, Sir Michael Jay, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, submitted a witness statement which seems to contain a note of official panic.

"It would be prejudicial to the national interest and to the conduct of the government's foreign policy if the English courts were to express opinions on questions of international law concerning the use of force ... which might differ from those expressed by the government," he wrote. Such an opinion "would inevitably weaken the government's hand in its negotiations with other states. Allied states, which have agreed with and supported the United Kingdom's views on the legality of the use of force, could regard such a step as tending to undermine their own position."

It doesn't seem to matter how many journalists, protesters or even lawyers point out that the British government had no legal case for attacking Iraq, that the attorney general's official justification was risible and that Blair's arguments were mendacious. As long as the government has a majority in parliament, the support of much of the press and an army of spin doctors constantly weaving and reweaving its story, it can shrug off these attacks. It can insist, with some success, that we "move on" from Iraq. But an official verdict, handed down by a court, is another matter. If a ruling like that of the German federal administrative court were made over here, it could be devastating for Blair and his ministers.

The prosecutors have lost before. In 1999, a sheriff (a junior Scottish judge) at the court in Greenock instructed the jury to acquit three women who had boarded a Trident submarine testing station on Loch Goil and thrown its computers into the sea. They had argued that the deployment of the nuclear weapons carried by the submarines contravened international law. The sheriff said she could not "conclude definitively" whether or not this was true, but that she had "heard nothing which would make it seem to me that the accused acted with criminal intent". The court of session in Edinburgh later overturned her ruling. Now campaigners against nuclear weapons will be mounting further legal challenges, as they try to sustain a continuous peaceful blockade of the Trident base at Faslane for a year (see www.faslane365.org).

In 1996, four women were acquitted of conspiracy and criminal damage after disabling a Hawk jet which was due to be sold by BAE to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. They argued that they were using reasonable force to prevent crimes of genocide that the Indonesian government was committing in East Timor. Their acquittal might have helped persuade Robin Cook to seek to introduce an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy in 1997 (he was, as we now know, thwarted by Blair).

It is true that such verdicts (or non-verdicts) impose no legal obligations on the government. They do not in themselves demonstrate that its ministers are guilty of war crimes. But every time the prosecution fails to secure a conviction, the state's authority to take decisions which contravene international law is weakened.

These cases cannot reverse the hideous consequences of the crime of aggression (the "supreme international crime", according to the Nuremberg tribunals) that Blair and Bush committed in Iraq. But they do make it harder to repeat.

Of Used Brillo Pads: Zizek, Penman, and Ironical Correctness

2006-10-04T21:40:00.000+01:00

Brought to you by Andy Warhol

Without defensively resorting to citational pedantry, academic-Big-Other castration, or psychophilosophicus pomposity, much less an insistence on the precious existence of some extra-ideological humanist kernal (ala Sokal et el) that magically "exposes" the fakery of applied social theory, of Academic Institution - its Form, its syntax, its Message (instead of being its very condition of possibility), I think Penpill's response to Z-Man, here and here, is itself a misguided patho-casualty of the very flaws, of the impotent malaise that both Z-Man and Penpill are forever challenging ...

I have difficulty here taking seriously someone who's point of departure in ridiculing Z-Man is a conflating, a short-circuiting of Thought with Feeling, of "real" thoughts really really really manifesting one's indivisible, ineluctable unconscious desires. Isn't this at the very core of Kapitalist New Ageism, of Gestalt therapy verbatim, of the reductivist reality principle, and of a reactionary retreat into mystic post-modern subjectivity? Was this all just in Penrap jest? Just another flaky pendulum squirm of in-your-face pomo Oirony? A response to this guy accosting him while out jogging?

No, it wasn't. It is worryingly suggestive of a cynically passive, nostalgic idealisation of a time (up to post-punk early-1980s, reading Derrida and Lacan, watching Scarface [or maybe even its later art-house classist British "remake", Peter Greenaway's Jacobian The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover?]) when someone like Z-Man would have been taken seriously by the NME crew, but now is a suitably safe and iconic, media-construct-saturated performing chameleon hyperstitionally whisked off the 1983 set of Woody Allen's Zelig as Tony Montana's Id ... Someone who's "criticisms" of Z-Man amount in this instance to nothing more than lazy personal abuse?

There are many serious reasons to be devastatingly critical (and I include myself in that cohort) of Z-Man - his refusal to engage with issues, his philosophy-as-parlour-game, his political schizophrenia, romantically appealing for far-left Leninist revolutionary Acts while simultaneously justifying the antics of the Christian fundamentalist far right [on "class antagonistic" grounds to be sure - his alibi then oh-so-remaining intact] and scribbling nonsense about the "saintly" Lacanian Pure Desire of Drive in the obnoxious Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, his appalling Israeli visitation to promote his filmic perversion as Lebanon suffered mass meltdown, making him one of the very "liberal communists" he supposedly so detests - but Penman's resort to ad hominem, personality-driven derogatory assaults is not one of the better ones.

"Cultural Analysis, it's as easy as this ridiculously sublime Lego set."

From 90s Political Correctness to 00s Ironical Correctness: let's just "I don't wish to offend, but ..." disavowedly lash out at Z-Man's Slovenian/East European eccentricities and idiosyncracies, in an update of Steven Hawking AS INTERVIEWED BY Beavis and Butthead passive-aggressivist, Ricky Gervais.

The lisping, slobbering lego man, with a used Brillo pad for a beard ... [What, Marx?]

"I blame it all on Scarface."

Penman: "I know we are supposed to be above such things and shouldnt mention it, but what's with the cheap false teeth or whatever it is causes him to pronounce all his Sz as SH's? ("Show we sheee clearly wish SHyco...") and means that he comes across as even more of a cliche Whacky Euro Prof than he would anyway?" Do you imagine he'd get to make all of these documentaries if he didn't, if he wasn't? That's the rub: the subject supposed to be a "Cliche Whacky Euro Prof."

Penman, appropriating a fantasy-female Big Other - as real autonomous being - to the cause: ""He's just a stupid old man with a beard Penman." ... [] ... "But Christ if I have to read or hear that beating-yourself-up-before-the-Other-as-liberating-paradigm example from The Fight Club ONE MORE TIME I'll tear his bloody beard out by the roots... "

Time to grow one yourself then, Ian ...[for iconical correctness sake].

Parallax Deadlock Post-Godel

2006-09-03T02:28:00.000+01:00

First Impressions

Fredric Jameson

The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek · MIT, 434 pp, £16.95

From London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 17, 7th September, 2007

As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Zizek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific advances. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call a montage of attractions, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of numbers succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Zizeks books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Still, one would not have it any other way, which is why the current volume which, with its companion The Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outline the system as a whole (if it is one), or at least to make a single monumental statement inspires some apprehension.

It will be dialectical to say that this apprehension is and is not confirmed. The first chapter, which explains the title and seeks to ground Zizeks philosophy in some definitive method, is tough going indeed; Ill come back to it. But later chapters on Heidegger and politics, on cognitive philosophy and its impasses, on anti-semitism, on politics today are luminous and eloquent, and will surely stand as major statements, with enough to provoke and irritate people from one end of the ideological spectrum to another (I am myself attacked in passing as some kind of gullible practitioner of commodification theory). Nor are they lacking in jokes, as tasteless as you might wish, and in passing remarks on current films (Zizek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious one never does that).

As for what has persisted through this now considerable oeuvre, I will start with the dialectic, of which Zizek is one of the great contemporary practitioners. The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the appearance; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or essence; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was true after all.

What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Lets take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Langs Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Langs capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality which is to say in the true appearance Edward G. Robinson is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor. Hollywoods censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.

Zizeks interpretative work, from page to page, seems to revel in these paradoxes: but that is itself only some stupid first impression (one of his favourite phrases). In reality, the paradox-effect is designed to undo that second moment of ingenuity, which is that of interpretation (it looks like this to you, but in reality what is going on is this . . .): the paradox is of the second order, so that what looks like a paradox is in reality simply a return to the first impression itself.

Or perhaps we might rather say: this is not a paradox, this is perversity. And indeed, the dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. But it is undermined together with its own accompanying interpretations of that reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the commonsense empiricist reality itself, until we understand that the interpretations are themselves also part of precisely that first impression. This is why the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of what is. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its truths; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their practical component always interrupts the unity of theory and prevents it from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. Alain Badiou has recently coined the expression anti-philosophy for these new and constitutively scandalous modes of intervening conceptually in the world; it is a term that Zizek has been very willing to revindicate for himself.

Still, what can be the theoretical, if not indeed the philosophical content of Zizeks little interpretative tricks? Lets first take on the supremely unclassifiable figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all Zizeks work. One of Jacques Lacans late seminars has the title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic proposition (the undeceived are mistaken) with the oldest formula in the Lacanian book, le nom du Père, the name of the Father or, in other words, the Oedipus complex. However, Lacans later variant has nothing to do with the Father, but rather with the structure of deception. As everyone knows, the truth is itself the best disguise, as when the spy, asked what he does in life, answers, Why, Im a spy, only to be greeted with laughter. This peculiarity of truth, to express itself most fully in deception or falsehood, plays a crucial role in analysis, as one might expect. And as one might also expect, it is in that great non- or anti-philosopher Hegel that we find the most elaborate deployment of the dialectic of the necessity of error and of what he called appearance and essence, as well as the most thoroughgoing affirmation of the objectivity of appearance (one of the deeper subjects of The Parallax View). The other great modern dialectician, Theodor Adorno (whose generic tone compares with Zizeks, perhaps, as tragedy to comedy), was fond of observing that nowhere was Hegel closer to his heroic contemporary Beethoven than in the great thunderchord of the Logic, the assertion that Essence must appear!

Yet this insistence on appearance now seems to bring us around unexpectedly to the whole vexed question of postmodernism and postmodernity, which is surely nothing if it is not a wholesale repudiation of essences in the name of surface, of truth in the name of fiction, of depth (past, present or future) in the name of the Nietzschean eternally recurring here-and-now. Zizek seems to identify postmodernism with postmodern philosophy and relativism (an identification he shares with other enemies of these developments, some of them antediluvian, some resistant to the reification of the label), while on the other hand he endorses the proposition of an epochal change, provided we dont call it that and provided we insist that it is still, on whatever scale, capitalism something with which I imagine everyone will nowadays be prepared to agree. Indeed, some of his basic propositions are unthinkable except within the framework of the epochal, and of some new moment of capitalism itself; Lacan is occasionally enlisted in the theorisation of these changes, which have taken place since Freud made his major discoveries.

Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: Enjoy! Of course, the inner-directed Victorian must equally have been directed to enjoy his own specific historical repressions and sublimations; but that jouissance was probably not the same kind of enjoyment as that taken by the subject of consumer society and of obligatory permissiveness (Marcuse called it repressive desublimation), the subject of a desperate obligation to liberate ones desires and to fulfil oneself by satisfying them. Yet psychoanalysis always involves a tricky and unstable balance between the theorisation of an eternal human psyche and the historical singularity of culture and mores: the latter tilts you back into periodisation, while the eternal model is secured by the simple reminder that desire is never satisfied, whether you are a Victorian in thrall to duty or a postmodern intent on pleasure.

This is the point at which we reach the most persistent of all Zizeks fundamental themes: namely, the death wish, the Thanatos, or what he prefers to call the death drive. Modern theory is indeed haunted by Freuds death wish, that better mousetrap which any self-respecting intellectual owes it to himself or herself to invent a theory of (Freuds own version having satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to retain everything that is paradoxical (or perverse) in Zizeks (or in Lacans) version of the matter; for here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of The Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the Wandering Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live for ever). The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical destinies or even our existential experience: the Thanatos lives through us (in us what is more than us); it is our species-being; and this is why it is preferable (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire, and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum desires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitute.

As for jouissance, it is perhaps the central or at least the most powerful category in Zizeks explanatory resources, a phenomenon capable of projecting a new theory of political and collective dynamics as much as a new way of looking at individual subjectivity. But to grasp the implications it is best to see jouissance as a relational concept rather than some isolated ultimately determining instance or named force. In fact, it is the concept of the envy of jouissance that accounts for collective violence, racism, nationalism and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual investments, choices and obsessions: it offers a new way of building in the whole dimension of the Other (by now a well-worn concept which, when not merely added mechanically onto some individual psychology, evaporates into Levinassian sentimentalism). The power of this conception of envy may also be judged from the crisis into which it puts merely consensual and liberal ideals like those of Rawls or Habermas, which seem to include none of the negativity we experience in everyday life and politics. Zizek, indeed, includes powerful critiques of other current forms of bien-pensant political idealism such as multiculturalism and the rhetoric of human rights admirable liberal ideals calculated to sap the energies of any serious movement intent on radical reconstruction.

All these ideals presuppose the possibility of some ultimate collective harmony and reconciliation as the operative goal or end of political action. It would be wrong to identify these ultimate aims with utopian thinking, which on the contrary presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system. Rather, they are associated, for Zizek, with that quite different absence of antagonism denounced in his very first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), a target also identified by Lacan and which has always been central in Zizeks tireless explanations and propagation of Lacanian doctrine. This is the conviction that human subjectivity is permanently split and bears a gap within itself, a wound, an inner distance that can never be overcome: something Lacan demonstrated over and over again in an extraordinarily complex (and dialectical) articulation of the original Freudian models. But taken at this level of generality it is a view that might easily lead to social pessimism and conservatism, to a view of original sin and the incorrigibility of some permanent human nature.

It is to forestall and exclude just such a disastrous misunderstanding of the social and political consequences of the Lacanian gap that is the task of The Parallax View. The book does so, however, not by any immediate extrapolation of the gap or constitutive distance from individual to collective; but rather by juxtaposing the theoretical consequences of split subjectivity on a variety of disciplinary levels (whence the difficulty of the opening chapter).

A parallax, Websters says, is the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer; but it is best to put the emphasis not on the change or shift, so much as on the multiplicity of observational sites, for in my opinion it is the absolute incommensurability of the resultant descriptions or theories of the object that Zizek is after, rather than some mere symptomal displacement. The idea thus brings us back to that old bugbear of postmodern relativism, to which it is certainly related. (Popular locution mutes this scandal by way of narrative: X tells the story of quantum theory, or modern dictatorship, this way; Y tells a different story. These convenient and widely accepted turns of phrase efface all the serious philosophical debates about causality, historical agency, the Event, philosophies of history, and even the status of narrative itself, which is probably why Zizek, assimilating the problems themselves to postmodern philosophy, has often been dismissive of narrative as such.)

The more fundamental difference at issue can be measured by comparing the parallax idea with the old Heisenberg principle, which asserted that the object can never be known, owing to the interference of our own observational system, the insertion of our own point of view and related equipment between ourselves and the reality in question. Heisenberg is then truly postmodern in the assertion of an absolute indeterminacy of the real or the object, which withdraws into the status of a Kantian noumenon. In parallax thinking, however, the object can certainly be determined, but only indirectly, by way of a triangulation based on the incommensurability of the observations.

The object thus is unrepresentable: it constitutes precisely that gap or inner distance which Lacan theorised for the psyche, and which renders personal identity for ever problematic (mans radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs). The great binary oppositions subject v. object, materialism v. idealism, economics v. politics are all ways of naming this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and incommensurabilities are indispensable to productive thinking (itself just such a gap), provided we do not lapse into some complacent agnosticism or Aristotelian moderation in which the truth lies somewhere in between; provided, in other words, we perpetuate the tension and the incommensurability rather than palliating or concealing it.

The reader will judge from the case-studies in this volume whether parallax theory has been fruitful. In particular, the chapter on the dilemmas of cognitive science the material brain and the data of consciousness is a superb achievement which transcends Spinozan parallelism towards the ultimate Hegelian paradox: Spirit is a bone. As far as politics is concerned, it seems to me that Zizeks lesson is as indispensable as it is energising. He believes (as I do) that Marxism is an economic rather than a political doctrine, which must tirelessly insist on the primacy of the economic system and on capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political situation (as well as of all the other ones social, cultural, psychic and so forth). Yet it was always a fundamental mistake to think that Marxism was a philosophy which aimed at substituting the ultimately determining instance of the economic for that of the political. Karl Korsch taught us eighty years ago that for Marxism the economic and the political are two distinct and incommensurable codes which say the same thing in radically different languages.

So how to think about the concrete combinations they present in real life and real history? At this point, we glimpse what is clearly Zizeks basic Lacanian model for parallax: it is the Masters scandalous and paradoxical idea that between the sexes il ny a pas de rapport sexuel (Seminar XX). If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, Zizek writes, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint. The practical consequences are startling:

To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure/superstructure: we should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, the objective material socioeconomic processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other, the politico-ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently sterile, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real site and politics is a theatre of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology.

This is a far better starting point for the left than the current interminable debates about identity v. social class (it also seems to me a more appropriate climax than the enigmatic reflections on Bartleby that actually close the book).

But it is appropriate, in the light of the earlier discussion, to ask just how dialectical this now turns out to be. I think an argument would run something like this: that third moment of the dialectic which returned to appearance as such is sometimes described (in Hegelian jargon) as returning to appearance qua appearance, to appearance with the understanding both that it is appearance and that nonetheless as appearance it has its own objectivity, its own reality as such. This is precisely what happens, I believe, with the two alternatives of the parallax, let us say the subjective and the objective one. To discover that neither the code of the subject nor the code of the object offers in itself an adequate representation of the unrepresentable object it designates means to rediscover each of these codes as sheer representation, to come to the conviction that each is both necessary and incomplete, that each is so to speak a necessary error, an indispensable appearance. I would only want to wonder whether there are not more complex forms of the parallax situation which posit more than two alternatives (on the order of subject and object), but which rather confront us with multiple, yet equally indispensable codes.

I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Zizeks project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latters impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code (not even Lacans) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in the local terms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.

Yet theory was always itself grounded on a fundamental (and insoluble) dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work inevitably over time get thematised (to use Paul de Mans expression); they get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so), and eventually turn into systems in their own right. The self-consuming movement of the theoretical process gets slowed down and arrested, its provisional words turn into names and thence into concepts, the anti-philosophy becomes a philosophy in its own right. My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Zizek may turn out to have produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it is probably better not to call the unnameable.

Hauntology, Forgiveness and Perversity in Jerusalem

2006-07-30T01:43:00.000+01:00

“Man cannot live without belief in something that is
indestructible, even as the indestructible, and the belief in it, are forever hidden from him.” ===>Franz Kafka

Udi Oloni, director of Forgiveness: ... after September 11, I was sitting in a seminar at NYU of Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell about forgiveness. It was a very powerful seminar that made me contemplate the philosophical-political issues in my previous movie, Local Angel. Derrida says that when it is impossible to forgive, only then forgiveness can take place. In my previous movie, I tried to challenge this idea, and I visited Yasser Arafat while he was on curfew in order to try to understand the conditions for forgiveness, not between individuals, but between nations. When I finished shooting the new film, it suddenly occurred to me that this movie also deals the concept of forgiveness --but more in its emotional, melancholic aspects, and maybe as a necessary step towards love ...I want to bring the possibility of forgiveness back from heaven to the realm of the possible, the realm of politics, the realm of action --in short, back to earth.

Dear Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

I read your letter asking me to boycott the Jerusalem International Film Festival. As you know, I'm coming to Palestine and Israel for the sole purpose of supporting Udi Aloni's film, Forgiveness, which is in my opinion maybe the most beautiful, powerful and important film ever made about the tragedies of the region. Even though I know that many of the individuals who run the Jerusalem Film Festival care tremendously about creating peace and justice, I
respect non-violent means of resistance chosen by my colleagues in Palestine in the fight against the Occupation, the Wall, the Israeli government's Apartheid policies, and the violence against the Palestinian people.

After communicating with others in the international community of intellectuals (including my long time friend, Judith Butler, who shared her huge appreciation with me for the movie Forgiveness and who also agrees that in this terrible time, we cannot act as if there is "business as usual"), I've decided to come as a guest of the film and not of the festival, regardless of the festival's good intentions. Therefore, I'm going to reimburse the festival for all funds that they've spent in bringing me. Yet I will speak about Forgiveness in Jerusalem, and I'm happy that the film is showing in the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Again, this isn't an easy decision for me. But I think it is the solution best fit for preserving the right of Israelis to change the hearts and minds of other Israelis through art and other means, while at the same time respecting the means of struggle that you have chosen. Further, I will make my first appearance in Ramallah for our friends who cannot come to Jerusalem because of the Apartheid policies of the Israeli government and the Wall.

Let's hope that with the combined forces of Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals, we'll be able to bring justice, equality, and peace to the two peoples.

In solidarity,
Slavoj Zizek [Via I Cite]

[See also Zizek's explanation, during his recent Birkbeck lecture series on Lacan, for his attendance at the festival - Audio recording (final third) and transcript (via Different Maps)].

Two days after the beginning of the Israeli assault on Lebanon on July 12, Zizek delivered a lecture on Udi Oloni's Forgiveness at the Jerusalem Film Festival, immediately following a screening of Zizek's own film, The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.

[Extract here from a video recording of Zizek's 1-hour address at the festival]

Review of Forgiveness
written by Slavoj Zizek

FORGIVENESS realizes Eisenstein's old dream of film as a form of thinking: it confronts incompatible levels (the Holocaust and the Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, victims and executioners, lovers and parents, political and private, reality and dreams) without offering any straight solution - it forces every viewer to start thinking and search for possible solutions. The thinking the film gives rise to is not a cold appraisal, but an emotionally engaged participation - the film THINKS WITH EMOTIONS, which is why many scenes display an almost unbearable emotional intensity. I was deeply shattered by this film. It works on me like magic. Although FORGIVENESS is deeply critical politically, it provides a profound experience of Jewish spirituality.

Review of Gilgul Mechilot & Forgiveness

written by Judith Butler

Udi Aloni's collection renews a theological reflection in the midst of ordinary life, popular culture, contemporary scenes of life and death. His film, "Local Angel," brings us into visual contact with Walter Benjamin's concept of the "ruin" that animated fragment from the past that drives us in ways that we cannot always know. He moves to the center of violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians only to find there remnants of a theological relation to the 'Temple Mount' that furtively circumscribes the struggle over land, property, ownership, and claims to time and space.
In his screenplay, "Forgiveness," it is the land and the mental institution built there that acts as the ruin, foreclosing the possibility of a return to the death and displacement of Palestinians who lived in the village of Diryasin. The mental receives the Jews who emerge from the Nazi genocide as 'musulman' - traumatized to the point of losing speech and self-reference. So the musulman, the muslim, the christian, and the Jew are compounded here at this multiple and unfathomable site of loss, where on the
land where a Palestinian village was destroyed, an Israeli mental institution is built to receive the destroyed lives of Jews from the concentration camps. Madness ensues, but what alternative is there?
In his meditation, "Jocasta's Dream" Aloni makes clear that there are those humans who are murdered from the start, who live their murdered life not only in spite of their apparent death, but through the endless terms of that death-like world. Suicide is not simply a tragic conclusion, but a sign only that one has ceased to be able to stop the cycle of violence and the evisceration of those sites that allow for mourning to begin.
There is no single loss in this terrain of destroyed villages, destroyed lives, only a question of whether the law that mandates continuing destruction can be openly opposed, whether the sites can be reclaimed for open mourning, and whether a new generation can break the curse that animates the places in their partial memories and constitutive disavowals, whether a wide enough angle can take in the full array of loss, mourning, violence, and inadvertent hope. Since hope, too, emerges in tandem with destruction, only because loss binds us, and binding is the condition for new community.
Aloni lays bare the visual landscape of these ruins, finding theological and mythological resonance in the political and emotional dilemmas they pose. And in the laying bare, some hope emerges for a life that is not murdered from the start, whose birth is not implicated in the curse of revenge, whose ability to acknowledge an irreparable loss makes way for another future.

Derrida's Between The Two Deaths Revisited

On April 9, 1948, a Jewish militia entered the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and killed over 100 villagers.
Soon after, a mental hospital was built on the ruins. The first patients to be committed were Holocaust survivors.
A legend says that to this day, the survivors have been communicating with the ghosts of the village.
FORGIVENESS (Mechilot) [The word mechilot in Hebrew contains a double meaning: one meaning is 'forgiveness,' and the other is 'underground tunnels'] tells the story of David Adler, a 20-year old American-Israeli who decides to move back to Israel, where he joins the Israeli army and kills a Palestinian girl, only to find himself committed to a mental institution that sits on the ruins of a Palestinian village called Deir Yassin.

Flashbacks and flashforwards reveal the events that led up to his hospitalization. A 10-year old female ghost holds the secret to the riddle. But only when the secret is revealed can she find rest and give David the option to end a perpetually-repeated destiny...

Doctor Itzhik Shemesh, a psychiatrist at the mental institute, injects David with a chemo-technological drug in an attempt
to build a bridge over the trauma zone and allow David to live a normal life. Even though he doubts its ethical consequences, his use of the drug is an act that mirrors his own deep denial...

[Script Extracts]

DOCTOR
What does it mean, erasing the memory of someone like David Adler? David Adler, who made aaliyah, precisely because of his memory; David Adler, who, because of the Jewish precept to “never forget,” came here to serve our country. Can we really erase the memory of his trauma, and yet keep the memory that he inherited from his father, whose family was murdered for no other reason than for being Jews? And what demons will fill the hole that we carved in David Adler’s mind? Should we invent a drug that keeps the memory intact but eliminates the associations--be they guilt, or horror, or fear? You might ask why I am raising these questions,
when we have many young people with similar conditions who function well in our society. Does killing our memory destroy the very essence of our Jewishness? When I looked into the eyes of David Adler, and saw the void, I thought of the light in the eyes of my grandfather, a righteous man from Jerusalem, and all I could think was, “God help us.”

MUSELMANN
The voices are real, Gentlemen. You can try to eradicate them, but they still exist.
DOCTOR
What voices?
MUSELMANN
The voices who speak to us. First you took the voices from the outside and put them on the inside and called them the subconscious. Then when you heard them again you called them psychosis, and you killed them with your poison. One hundred and twenty people you killed, and the day after, you built a mental institution on top of the mass grave--so that when one hears the voices of the spirits, you can condemn him as a madman.

Doctor Shemesh is given permission to use the drug by David's father, Henry Adler, a Holocaust survivor who spent a short time in Israel before becoming one of the most pre-eminent musicians in America.

Henry, who has the arrogance of Oedipus and faith in the rational overcoming of trauma via action, doesn't understand why his son has been hospitalized. But Henry's lust for life and his desire for normality make him live in denial of the past, which is unbearable for David, whose restless soul seeks the truth. Henry will confront a horror beyond all horrors when the truth reveals itself.

A blind patient in the hospital named Muselmann, also a Holocaust survivor, tells David to listen to the ghosts that are haunting him, that they have something important to tell him. [Muselmann is what they called the weakest people in Auschwitz. The ones on the verge of death. The ones beyond
despair. When we saw the living dead lying on the ground, we called them Muselmann. It means “Muslim” in German. Maybe they looked like Muslims praying all day long to God, totally surrendered… ]

Like the blind prophet Tiresias, Muselmann knows that the truth does not hold redemption, and this is why he never tried
to reconstruct his life after the camps. Because he lives between the world of the dead and the living, Muselmann can act as a conduit between the murdered ghosts and David.

MUSELMANN
(shaking his fingers)
This is my house. I am a mole.

DOCTOR
A mole?
MUSELMANN
A blind little animal, digging and digging. You know, Herr Doktor, an old Hasidic rabbi once told me that when the righteous Jews of Poland were killed, their spirits began traveling through underground tunnels toward the Mount of Olives; for it is at the Mount of Olives that they will be resurrected when the Messiah comes. But when they reach the gates of the Mount, do you know who will be there to greet them?
Some other PATIENTS who have been listening to Muzelmann gather round, saying, “A mole, a mole!”
DOCTOR
I suppose a mole.
MUSELMANN
(wide-eyed) Imagine, Doktor! There I am. Behind me,
piled high, are the bones of the slaughtered. In front of me, the spirits of the righteous Jews are coming. I must protect the spirits! For if they touch the bones they will lose their purity and will not be redeemed. So I tell them, “You cannot pass this way. This is a mass grave--a cemetery of the innocent!” And now those poor souls cannot go back and cannot go forward. So
there we stand, facing each other with blind eyes for eternity!
The flashbacks and flashforwards from the mental institute reveal, with the story of David’s life, the story of the eternal return of the trauma and a destiny that seems unalterable...

HENRY
Yaakov, what did you do to my son? Release him from these demons that are haunting us. Let him go. Or are you telling me something I don’t know?
MUSELMANN
Henry, Henry, Henry. This secret is horrifying for you and for me; therefore my silence I will keep. You bear your burdens, I’ll bear mine. It’s better that way, please believe me.
HENRY
Don’t patronize me, old man. With your blind eyes you see nothing. You’re trying to draw David into your madness, but I won’t let you. I am taking him away.
MUSELMANN
Henry, Henry, Henry. Is it not enough that you have already murdered? Now, your vanity will sacrifice your son.
HENRY
You’re all full of riddles, but you don’t have any answers. We both came from the same hell. But you gave up on life; you chose to be with the ghosts. But I, I have to push them away, to fight them every single day to play my music. Not the way we played there, so that people wouldn’t hear the screaming, but to make the spirits fall asleep. I can’t let you hijack my son into your darkness just because you chose death.
MUSELMANN
Henry, Henry, Henry. Let the dead bury the dead, and don’t accuse me. You are the victim of your own success. You have eyes and you see nothing. The one who you saved you now kill. I chose nothing;
therefore I live between the worlds. I love David as the son I never had, and the tears from my blind eyes are now dropping for your fate. It is not in my hands to save, nor to destroy. The truth lies here, in the digging. And in this place, where you have been reborn, you will die. Therefore I tell you this: walk away, Henry, and give David the chance we never had. Leave him in my hands, for I am not alive; thus I am protected.

Zizek: Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness (2005) is a fiction movie based on one of those crazy historical coincidences: in order to arouse panic among the Palestinians and make them flee during the 1948 war, the Israeli army killed the population of a small Palestinian village in the suburb of Jerusalem and razed to ground all houses; afterwards, they built on these grounds a psychiatric hospital for the survivors of the holocaust (later for the victims of the terrorist kidnappings). The hypothesis of the film is that the patients are haunted by the ghosts of those who are buried beneath the ground of the hospital, in an example of what Gilles Deleuze referred to as the atemporal superimposition of historical moments in the crystal-image. The irony is shattering: those most sensitive to the ghosts of the killed Palestinians are the very survivors of the holocaust (the film plays with the fact that the living dead in the camps were called Muslims, Musulmannen). Aloni neither elevates the holocaust into the Absolute Crime which somehow legitimizes Israeli activity in the occupied zones, allowing the Israelis to dismiss all criticism of the Israeli politics as secretly motivated by the holocaust-denial; nor does he resort to the ridiculously false (and effectively latently anti-Semitic) equation “what Nazis were doing to the Jews, the Jews are now doing to Palestinians.”

So why should we, as Badiou proposes, abstract from the holocaust when we judge the Israeli politics towards Palestinians? Not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the holocaust was an incomparably stronger crime. It is those who evoke holocaust that effectively manipulate it, instrumentalizing it for today’s political uses. The very need to evoke holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts secretly implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump-card of holocaust can redeem them.

... in the concentration-camp universe at its most horrifying, it is no longer possible to sustain this gap between reality in its material inertia and the aethereal domain of infinite Life. The Muslim is so destitute that his stance can no longer be considered "tragic": he no longer retains the minimum of dignity against the background of which his miserable position would have appeared as tragic - he is simply reduced to the shell of a person, emptied of the spark of spirit. If we try to present him as tragic, the effect will be precisely comic, as when one tries to read tragic dignity into a meaningless idiotic persistence. On the other hand, although the Muslim is in a way "comic," although he acts in the way that is usually the stuff of comedy and laughter (his automatic, mindless repetitive gestures, his impassive pursuit of food), the utter misery of his condition thwarts any attempt to present him as a "comic character." Again, if we try to present him as comic, the effect will be precisely tragic, like when the sad sight of someone cruelly mocking a helpless victim (like putting the obstacles in the way of a blind person, to see if he will stumble), instead of producing laughter in the observers, generates sympathy for the victim's tragic predicament. Did not something along these lines happen with the rituals of humiliation in the camps, from the notorious inscription above the entrance to the Auschwitz gate "Arbeit macht frei!" to the music band that accompanied prisoners to work or to gas chambers? It is only through such cruel humor that the tragic sentiment can be generated in the concentration camp universe.

The Muslim is thus the zero-point at which the very opposition between tragedy and comedy, between the sublime and the ridiculous, between dignity and derision, is suspended, the point at which one pole directly passes into its opposite. If we try to present his predicament as tragic, the result is comic, a mocking parody of the tragic dignity, and if we treat him as a comic character, tragedy emerges. We enter here the domain that is somehow outside or, rather, beneath the very elementary opposition of the dignified hierarchical structure of authority and its carnivalesque reversal, of the original and its parody, its mocking repetition. Can one imagine a film rendering THIS domain?

Udi Oloni: Primo Levi describes the Muselmann in the camps as a non-alive creature: even though there is no life in his eyes, he is not dead. Even though he cannot bear witness to the horror, he is, by his very existence, the testimony to the horror itself.

I placed the Muselmann and the entire story in a mental institute built in Israel on the ruins of a Palestinian village, Deir Yassin, most of the inhabitants of which were massacred in 1948. (This mental institute exists to this day and its first patients were Holocaust survivors.) I placed the psychological story in the soul of our protagonist David Adler, the son of Henry Adler and the one who carries the trauma into the future.

The mood of the film is located between the real and the uncanny. Between the conscious and the unconscious. From this mood emerges the aesthetic of the film. Within the mental institute, the aesthetic structure of the film will function vertically, as the undead (the victims of the massacre from the underground village) communicate with the unalive (the hospital patients) using the mental institute as conduit between the two worlds. Within the horizontal line of the narrative, the hospital acts as the hub from which flashbacks and flashforwards to New York, Israel, and Palestine emerge. FORGIVENESS tries to point to where the internal wounds of tragic heroes and tragic nations are bleeding and to suggest the possibility of an opening or a hope.

Alienating Displacements

2006-07-21T23:01:00.000+01:00

"I've been in the midsts of a bit of an intellectual nervous breakdown for the last couple of weeks (okay, I'm being melodramatic, kinda), wondering where, if anywhere, I stand with respect to any particular philosophical issue. This is why I've been writing little here. In a nutshell, I've been a little ball of anxiety, curled up in agony, void of thought, bemoaning my lack of commitments and the manner in which I experience myself as whatever I happen to be reading at the time, and feeling as if I'm a sham or a mere semblance (of course, this isn't so bad from a psychoanalytic perspective). Okay, and this isn't simply about philosophical commitments, but also has to do with reading Koyre's From Closed World to Infinite Universe before bed and thinking entirely too much about what it means to be in an infinite universe without center, fixity, or orienation ..."

... from a recent addition to the blogosphere, the Brilliant new blog, Larval Subjects.

Haecceities Revisited

2006-06-22T02:54:00.000+01:00

Brueghel: Hunters in the Snow (1565) [featured in the pre-zero-gravity library scene in Tarkovsky's Solaris, one of cinema's finest manifestations of the haecceity].

Delighted to see Mark K-punk [as also noted by Daniel/Josef K at Different Maps] revisit the haecceity, the thisness of this, in his review of John Foxx's latest LP, Tiny Colour Movies:

This is not an inner but Outer calm; not a discovery of a cheap New Age 'real' Self , but a positive alienation, in which the cold pastoral freezing into a tableau is experienced as a release from identity.

Dun Scotus' concept of the haecceity - the 'here and now' - seems particularly aposite here. Deleuze and Guattari seize upon this in A Thousand Plateaus as a depersonalized mode of individuation in which everything - the breath of the wind, the quality of the light - plays a part. A certain use of film - think, particularly, of the aching stillness in Kubrick and Tarkovsky - seems especially set up to attune us to hacceity; as does the polaroid, a capturing of a haecceity which is itself a haecceity.

From Solaris production design. Artist: Michail Romadin.

From Mirror production design. Artist: Nikolai Dvigubsky

... That We Are Basically Watching Shit, As It Were

2006-06-19T04:28:00.000+01:00

Edited transcription [with notes and cross-media re-formatting] of the two-and-a-half hour Sophie Fiennes-directed The Pervert's Guide To Cinema, narrated and presented by Slavoj Zizek.

The problem for us is not whether our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire?

There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural about human desires. Our desires are artificial - we have to be taught to desire.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.

[Note: Perversion in psychoanalysis: The basic structure of perversion is that you perceive yourself as the instrument of others' jouissance. This is why, for example, Don Giovanni is a pervert. What is his big trick? His gift is not that he is beautiful, but that he can guess or discern the fantasy of each woman, and he tries to stage that fantasy. Which is why Lacan says une par une--une pour une; for each her own specific fantasy. For the pervert is totally void, he is there only to serve the other, to be the slave of the other's fantasy. This is very nicely expressed by Lacan: the formula of perversion is the simple reversal of the formula of fantasy. This is precisely what happens in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst is a passive blank, an empty screen onto which the analysand projects his or her own fantasies. Of course, as we all know, here is where the difference begins: rather than serving the fantasy, the analyst undermines it.]

[1] Possessed (1931; Director: Clarence Brown; Joan Crawford, Clarke Gable).

What we get in this wonderful clip from Possessed is commentary on the magic art of cinema within a movie. We have an ordinary working-class girl living in a drab small provincial town. All of a sudden she finds herself in a situation where reality itself reproduces the magic cinematic experience. She approaches the rail, and it is as if what in reality is just a person standing near a slowly passing train turns into a viewer observing the magic of the screen.

We get a very real ordinary scene onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were, her fantasy space is projected, so that, although all reality is simply there, the train, the girl, part of reality in her perception and in our viewer's perception is, as it were, elevated to the magic level, becomes the screen of her dreams.

This is cinematic art at its purest.

[2] The Matrix (1999; Directors: Andy and Larry Wachowski; Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fisburne, Carrie-Anne Moss)

But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality: if you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself

I want a third pill.

So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.

If something gets too traumatic, too violent, gets too, even too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality: we have to fictionalise it.

[3] The Birds (1963; Director: Alfred Hitchcock; Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy).

The first tip of horror films is to say - let's imagine the same story, but without the horror element. This gives us, I think, the background.

We [Zizek in boat with outboard motor] are in the middle of Bodega Bay, where the action of Hitchcock's The Birds takes place. The Birds is a film about a young socialite girl [Melanie] from San Francisco who falls in love with a guy [Mitch], goes after him to Bodega Bay where she discovers that he lives with his mother. And then there is the standard edible imbroglio of incestuous tension between mother and son, the son split between his possessive mother and the intrusive girl.

The big question about the birds of course is the stupid obvious one: why do the birds attack? It is not enough to say that the birds are part of the natural setup of reality, it is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes that literally tears apart reality. We humans are not naturally born into reality. In order for us to act as normal people who interact with other people who live in the space of social reality, many things should happen, like we should be properly installed within the symbolic order and so on. When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is disturbed, reality disintegrates.

So to propose the psychanalytic formula, the violent attacks of the birds are obviously explosive outbursts of maternal superego, of the maternal figure trying to prevent sexual relationship. So the birds are raw incestuous energy.

[Cut to Zizek losing control over the steering of his boat].

What am I doing? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, now I got it. My God, I'm thinking like Melanie! You know what I'm thinking now? I want to fuck Mitch! That's what you were thinking [laughter], no, no [losing control over boat's steering again]. Oh sorry, sorry, sorry [corrects steering]. I got this spontaneous confusion of directions.

[4] Psycho (1960; Director: Alfred Hitchcock)

We are in the cellar from the mother's house from Psycho. What's so interesting is that the very disposition of mother's house, events took place in it at three levels, first floor, ground floor, basement. It is as if they reproduce the three levels of human subjectivity. Ground floor is Ego, Norman behaves there as a normal son, whatever remains of his normal ego taking over. Upstairs its the Superego, maternal superego, because the dead mother is basically a figure of superego. And down in the cellar its the Id, the reservoir of these illicit drives. And so we can then interpret the event in the middle of the film when Norman carries the mother - or as we learn at the end of the film, mother's mummy, corpse, skeleton - from the first floor to the cellar. It is as if he is transposing her in his own mind, as a psychic agency, from superego to id.

Of course the lesson from it is the old lesson elaborated already by Freud that superego and id are deeply connected. The mother complains, first as a figure of authority, "How can you be doing this to me? Aren't you ashamed? This is a fruit cellar!," and then mother immediately turns into a figure of obscenity: "Do you think I'm fruity?" Superego is not an ethical agency, superego is an obscene agency bombarding us with impossible orders, laughing at us when, of course, we cannot ever fulfill its demand. The more we obey it the more it makes us guilty. There is always some aspect of an obscene madman in the agency of the superego.

[5] Duck Soup (1933; Director Leo McCarey). Monkey Business (1931; Director: Norman Z McLeod) ( The Marx Brothers).

We often find references to psychoanalysis embodied in the very relations between persons. For example, the three Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo. Its clear Groucho, the most popular one, with his nervous hyperactivity, is superego. Chico, the rational guy, egotistic, calculating all the time, is ego. And the weirdest of them all, Harpo, the mute guy, he doesn't talk - Freud said that drives are silent - he doesn't talk, he of course is id.

The id in all its radical ambiguity. Mainly what is so weird about the Harpo character is that he is so childishly innocent, just striving for pleasure, likes children, plays with children and so on, but at the same time possessed by some kind of primordial evil, aggressive all the time. And this unique combination of utter corruption and innocence is what the id is all about.

[6] The Exorcist (1973; Director: William Friedkin)

Voice is not an organic part of the human body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession. Remember that at the beginning of the film this was a beautiful young girl. How did she become a monster that we see? By being possessed? But who possessed her?

A voice, a voice in its obscene dimensions.

[7] The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933; Director: Fritz Lang).

The first big film about this traumatic dimension of the voice, the voice which freely floats around and is a traumatic presence, feared the ultimate moment, object of anxiety which distorts reality, was in 1931 in Germany, Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse. We do not see Mabuse until the end of the film: he is just a voice.

[8] Alien (1978; Director: Ridley Scott).

So the problem is - which is why [in The Exorcist] we have the two priests at her side - how to get rid of this intruder, of this alien intruder. It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien to repeat itself. As if we have just waited for some terrifying, alien, evil-looking small animal to jump out.

There is a fundamental imbalance - gap - between our psychic energy, called by Freud libido, this endless undead energy which persists beyond life and death and the poor finite reality of our bodies. It is not just the pathology of being possessed by ghosts: the lesson that we should learn and that the movies try to avoid is that we ourselves are the aliens.

Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force distorting, controlling our body.

[9] The Great Dictator (1940; Director: Charles Chaplin).

Nobody was as fully aware of the properly traumatic dimension of the human voice, the human voice not as the sublime, ethereal medium for expressing the depth of human subjectivity, but the human voice as a foreign intruder, nobody was more aware of this than Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons, the good small Jewish barber and his evil double Hindle, dictator, Hitler of course. The Jewish barber, the tramp figure, is of course the figure of silent cinema. Silent figures are basically like figures in cartoons, they don't know death, they don't know sexuality even, they don't know suffering, they just go on in their oral egotistic striving, like cats and mouse in a cartoon: you cut them into pieces, they're reconstituted. There is no finitude, there is no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of a naive, good evil, you are just egotistical, you want to compete, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper. What we get with sound is interiority, depth, guilt, pulpability, in other words the complex edible universe.

The problem of the film is not only the political problem, how to get rid of totalitarianism, of its terrible seductive power, but it is also this more formal problem, how to get rid of this terrifying dimension of the voice. Or, since we cannot get rid of it, how to domesticate it, how to transform this voice nonetheless into the means of expressing humanity, love, and so on. The German police [in the film] thinking [the Jewish barber] is Hitler and he has to address a large gathering.

There of course he delivers his big speech about the need of love, understanding between people, but there is a catch, even a double catch: people applaud exactly in the same way as they were applauding Hitler. The music that accompanies this great humanist finale, the overture to Wagner's opera Lohenngrin is the same music as the one we hear when Hitler is daydreaming about conquering the entire world and where he has a balloon in the shape of the globe, the music is the same.

This can be read as the ultimate redemption of music, that the same music which served evil purposes can be redeemed to served the good, or it can be read - and I think it should be read - in a much more ambiguous way, that with music we cannot ever be sure, insofar as it externalises our inner passion music is always potentially a threat.

[10] Mulholland Dr (2002; Director: David Lynch).

There is a short scene in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr which takes place in the theatre where we are now, where behind a microphone a woman is singing. Then out of exhaustion or whatever she drops down. Surprisingly, the singing goes on. Immediately afterwards it is explained it was a playback [actually, it was explained beforehand, but the effect is the same nonetheless], but for that couple of seconds when we are confused we confront this nightmarish dimension of an autonomous partial object ...

... like in the well-known adventure of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland where the cat disappears, the smile remains. "You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself."

The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called Death Drive. Here we have to be very careful. Death Drive is not a kind of a Buddhist striving for annihilation, I want to find eternal peace, no!, death drive is almost the opposite: death drive is what in the Stephen King horror fiction is called the dimension of the undead, of living dead, of something that remains alive even after it is dead, and in a way it is immortal in its badness itself, goes on, exists, you cannot destroy it, the more you cut it the more it exists, it goes on. This dimension of kind of diabolical undeadness is what partial objects are about

[11] The Red Shoes (1948; Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger).

The nicest example here for me I think is Michael Powell's Red Shoes, about the ballerina. Her passion for dancing is materialised in her shoes taking over. The shoes are literally the undead object.

[12] Dr Strangelove (1964; Director: Stanley Kubrick).

Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial object is the fist or, rather, the hand . This hand rising up: that is the whole point of Dr Strangelove. It is not simply something foreign to him, it is the very core of his personality.

[13] Fight Club ( 1999; Director: David Fincher).

Far from standing for some kind of perverted masochism or reactionary fantasy of violence this scene [the character in the film attacks himself with his own fist] is deeply liberating. I'm here, as it were, on the side of the fist. I think this is what liberation means: in order to attack the enemy you first have to beat the shit out of yourself. To get rid in yourself the debt which in yourself attaches you to the leader, to the conditions of slavery, and so on and so on.

There is always this conflict between me and my double. It is as if the double embodies myself, but without the castrated dimension of myself

[14] Dead Of Night ( 1945; Director: Alberto Cavalcanti).

There is an episode in the wonderful British horror classic Dead of Night, in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who gets jealous of his puppet. In an outburst of violence he destroys the puppet, then breaks down, and then in the very last scene in the film we see him in the hospital slowly regaining consciousness, coming back to himself. First his voice is stuck in the throat, then with great difficulty, finally he is able to talk, but he talks with the distorted voice of the dummy.

And the lesson is clear: the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become this object.

[15] The Conversation (1974 ; Director: Francis Ford Coppola).

I'm standing on the very balcony where the murder, the dramatic murder scene occurs in The Conversation, the murder of the husband observed through the stained glass in front of me by the private detective, Gene Hackman. The detective is in the nearby room. Significantly, just before he sees the murder, he observes the balcony through a crack in the glass wall. Whenever we have this famous proverbial peeping tom scene of somebody observing a traumatic event through a crack, it is never as if we are dealing with two parts on both sides of the wall of the same reality.

Before seeing anything or imagining to see something, he tries to listen, he behaves as an eavesdropper, with all of his private detective gadgets. What does this make him? Potentially at least it makes him into a fantasised, imagined entity. He doesn't fantasise the scene of the murder, he fantasises himself as a witness to the murder. What he sees on the blurred window, glass, which effectively functions as a kind of elementary screen, cinematic screen even, that should be perceived as a desperate attempt to visualise, hallucinate even, the bodily material support of what he hears.

[16] Blue Velvet (1986 ; Director: David Lynch).

Dorothy's apartment is one of those hellish places which abound in David Lynch's films, places where all moral and social inhibitions seem to be suspended, where everything is possible. The lowest masochistic sex, obscenities, the deepest level of our desires that we are not even ready to admit to ourselves, we are confronted with them in such places.

From what perspective should we observe this scene? Imagine the scene as that of a small child hidden in a closet or behind a door witnessing the parental intercourse. He doesn't yet know what sexuality is, how we do it, all he knows is what he hears, this strange deep breathing sound. And then he tries to imagine what goes on.

At the very beginning of Blue Velvet we see Geoffrey's father having a heart attack, falling down, we have the eclipse of the normal paternal authority. It is as if Geoffrey fantasises this wild parental couple of Dorothy and Frank as a kind of phantasmatic supplement to the lack of the real paternal authority. Frank not only obviously acts but even overacts, it is as if he is ridiculously excessive, gesticulating, shouting, and so on - are here to cover up something. The point is of course, the elementary one, to convince the invisible observer that father is potent, to cover up father's impotence, so the second way to read the scene would have been as a spectacle, a ridiculously violent spectacle, set up by the father to convince the son of his power, of his over-potence. The third way would have been to focus on Dorothy herself. Many feminists, of course, emphasise the brutality against women in this scene, the abuse, how the Dorothy character is abused. There is obviously this dimension in it. But I think one should risk a more shocking and obverse interpretation. What if the central, as it were, problem of this entire scene is Dorothy's passivity. So what if what Frank is doing is a kind of a desperate, ridiculous, but nonetheless effective, attempt of trying to help Dorothy, to awaken her out of her lethargy, to bring her into life. So if Frank is anybody's fantasy, maybe he's Dorothy's fantasy. There's a kind of a strange mutual interlocking of fantasies. Its not only ambiguity but ossillation between three focal points. This I think is what accounts for the strange reverberations of this scene.

[17] Vertigo ( 1958; Director: Alfred Hitchcock).

This brings us to our third [ after The Conversation and Blue Velvet] and maybe crucial example, what is for me the most beautiful shot in the entire Vertigo. The shot in which we see Scottie in the position of a peeping tom observing through a crack. It is as if Madeleine is really there in common reality while Scottie is peeping at her from some mysterious interspace, from some obscure nether-world.

This is the location of the imagined, fantasised Gaze.

Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot, from which the object looked upon returns the gaze.

After suspecting that a murder is taking place in a nearby hotel room, Gene Hackman, playing the private detective, enters this room and inspects the toilet. The moment he approaches the toilet in the bathroom it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory. It is clear that some kind of intense, implicit dialogue with Psycho is going on. In a very violent gesture as if adopting the role of Norman Bates' mother, the murder in Psycho, he opens up the curtain, inspects it in detail looking for traces of blood there, even inspecting the gap, the hole at the bottom of the sink, which is precisely another of these focal objects, because in Psycho the hole, through fadeout, is morphed into the eye, returning the gaze.

We say the eye is the window of the soul, but what if there is no soul behind the eye, what if the eye is a crack through which we can perceive just the abyss of a netherworld.

When we look through these cracks, we see the dark other side where hidden forces run the show. It is as if Gene Hackman establishes no we are nonetheless not in Psycho, let us return to my first object of fascination, the toilet bowl. He flushes it and then the terrible thing happens.

In our most elementary experience, when we flush the toilet excrements simply disappear out of our reality into another space, which we phenomenologically perceive as a kind of a netherworld, another reality, chaotic primordial reality, and the ultimate horror of course is if the flushing doesn't work, if objects return, if remainders, excremental remainders return from that dimension.

Hitchcock is all the time playing with this threshold. The most effective for me, even the most touching, scene of the entire Psycho is after the shower murder when Norman Bates tries to clean the bathroom. I remember clearly when in my adolescence I first saw the film how deeply I was impressed by, not only by, the length of the scene - it goes on for nearly ten minutes, details of things and so on and so on, but also by the care, the meticulousness, how it is done, and also by our spectators' identification with it. I think that this tells us a lot about the satisfaction of work, of a job well done, which is not so much to construct something new, but maybe human work at its most elementary, work as it were at the zero level, is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain. The work of erasing the stains, keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld which threatens to explode at any time and engulf us.

I think this is the fine sentiment that Hitchcock's films evoke. It is not simply that something horrible happens in reality. Something worse can happen which undermines the very fabric of what we experience as reality. I think it is very important how the first attack of the birds occurs in The Birds, precisely when Melanie crosses this bay. First we even don't perceive it as a bird, as if some stain appeared within the frame.

When a fantasy object, something imagined, an object from inner space, enters our ordinary reality, the texture of reality is twisted, distorted. This is how desire inscribes itself into reality, by distorting it.

Desire is a wound of reality.

The art of cinema consists in arousing desire, to play with desire, but at the same time keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it palpable.

When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre looking at the screen, you remember at the very beginning before the picture is on, its a black dark screen and then light is thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And are, is the entire magic of spectacle shown from the screen not a kind of a deceptive view trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were ...

DIESENSELESS

2006-05-18T22:04:00.000+01:00

For reasons that should be only too obvious to many of the readers here, this site is now indefinitely suspended ...

Re-engineering Utopian Archaeologies

2006-05-14T04:20:00.000+01:00

Utopia has always been a political issue, an unusual destiny for a literary form:

yet just as the literary value of the form is subject to permanent doubt, so also its political

status is structurally ambiguous. The fluctuations of its historical context do nothing to

resolve this variability, which is also not a matter of taste or individual judgment ...

Paradoxically, this exercize in pure Utopian formalism has brought us closer to

present-day political realities and contingencies than seems altogether desirable. Thus in

order to win back some degree of conviction, the content of the Utopian vision must seem

plausible (as Aristotle suggested about the tragic plot) without at all having to be

possible. We here return to the old generic problem that has been with us since the

beginning of this book: as a form, Utopia must be distinct from political reality; it must

offer a kind of mimesis of the political platform or manifesto while retaining, as it were,

its aesthetic distance. It must be marked as Utopian and thereby as partaking in a specific

and very special kind of aesthetic unreality: otherwise it falls into the world and,

particularly if realized, spells the end of Utopias in the way wryly distinct from the usual

prognoses of their current disappearance.

What can then today be the function of so ambiguous an entity as Utopia, if not as

a forecast of political and empirical possibilities?

... the secret message of all Utopias, present, past, and future:

"Are you really in danger?"

"Yes." His big head nodded in cordial agreement.

"You may fail us."

"Me? How?"

"You of your time. You individually may fail to understand us or

to struggle in your own life and time. You of your time may fail to

struggle altogether… We must fight to exist, to remain in

existence, to be the future that happens, That’s why we reached

you."

===>Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (NY, 1976), pp. 197-198.

Cultural Fictions II

The Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths is hosting a conference on the significance of science fiction for disciplines and practices associated with cultural studies, to be held on 15-16th June, 2006. In particular, we will be asking whether sci-fi’s privileged relationship to alterity – e.g. in the forms of the alien, the non-human and above all the future – is what makes it so attractive to politically and philosophically oriented research and other contemporary artistic practices.

In addition to the speakers named below (who more than justify the non-entrance fee on their own, I'm sure you'll agree), Steve 'Kode 9' Goodman, Infinite Thought and me should also be giving papers.

===>K-Punk: Cultural Fictions at Goldsmiths

Paradoxically, the older Marxist traditions, drawing uncritical lessons from Marx

and Engels’ historical analyses of Utopian socialism in The Communist Manifesto, and

also following Bolshevik usage, denounced its Utopian competition as lacking any

conception of agency or political strategy, and charactered Utopianism as an idealism

deeply and structurally averse to the political as such. The relationship between Utopia

and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian

thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia, very much continue to be

unresolved topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political

slogan and a politically energizing perspective.

Indeed, a whole new generation of the post-globalization Left – one which

subsumes remnants of the old Left and the New Left, along with those of a radical wing

of social democracy, and of First World cultural minorities and Third World

proletarianized peasants and landless or structurally unemployable masses – has more

and more frequently been willing to adopt this slogan, in a situation in which the

discrediting of communist and socialist parties alike, and the skepticism about traditional

conceptions of revolution, have cleared the discursive field. The consolidation of the

emergent world market – for this is really what is at stake in so-called globalization – can

eventually be expected to allow new forms of political agency to develop. In the

meantime, to adapt Mrs. Thatcher’s famous dictum, there is no alternative to Utopia, and

late capitalism seems to have no natural enemies (the religious fundamentalisms which

resist American or Western imperialisms having by no means endorsed anti-capitalist

positions). Yet it is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue:

tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the socialist and

communist movements, repealing all the welfare measures, the safety net, the right to

unionization, industrial and ecological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and

indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world.

What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only

that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been

proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable,

let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate

systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical

otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot

imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off

Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.

The fundamental dynamic of any Utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism)

will therefore always lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference iv , in the degree to

which such a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system

radically different from this one. We may in this follow Olaf Stapledon’s space-and-time

travelers, who gradually become aware that their receptivity to alien and exotic cultures is

governed by anthropomorphic principles:

At first, when our imaginative power was strictly limited by

experience of our own worlds, we could make contact only with

worlds closely akin to our own. Moreover, in this novitiate stage

of our work we invariably came upon these worlds when they were

passing through the same spiritual crisis as that which underlies the

plight of Homo sapiens today. It appeared that, for us to enter any

world at all, there had to be a deep- lying likeness or identity in

ourselves and our hosts.

[===>Olaf Stapledon, The Last and First Men/Star Maker (NY, 1968), p. 299.]

Stapledon is not strictly speaking a Utopian, as we will see later on; but no Utopian writer

has been quite so forthright in confronting the great empiricist maxim, nothing in the

mind that was not first in the senses. If true, this principle spells the end, not only of

Utopia as a form, but of Science Fiction in general, affirming as it does that even our

wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up of bits and pieces

of the here-and-now: "When Homer formed the idea of Chimera, he only joined into one

animal, parts which belonged to different animals; the head of a lion, the body of a goat,

and the tail of a serpent."vi On the social level, this means that our imaginations are

hostages to our own mode-of-production (and perhaps to whatever remnants of past ones

it has preserved). It suggests that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of

making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment (something I have

myself occasionally asserted ); and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the

most comprehensively ...

Archaeologies of the Future : The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

by Fredric Jameson [2005]

Iran Crisis: Philosophers Unite! And On Yer Spivak Bikes!

2006-05-07T03:59:00.000+01:00

This is not about stark existential choices, this is not about philosophers choosing to interpret the world as opposed to philosophers trying to change it; it is about systematic and ruthless dialogics [origin: The Pedagogy of The Oppressed] ...

Ramin Jahanbegloo in Tehran

BBC News confirms the bad news circulating in the past few days. Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin jahanbegloo has been arrested. On charges of spying and posing a security threat, Fars News adds. Kayhan also furthur elaborates.

Academic and philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who has joint Iranian and Canadian citizenship, was arrested on 27 April at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. He is now believed to be held incommunicado in Evin Prison, in Tehran, where he is at risk of torture or ill-treatment. There are unconfirmed reports that he is being held in the hospital wing. He may be a prisoner of conscience, detained solely on account of the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression.

Partial Objects And Over-Identification Strategies

2006-04-27T01:50:00.000+01:00

Ian Parker, author of Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction, tells the following story as symtomatic of Zizek's political oscillations and ambivalence in his on-going attempts to embrace death drive: "Here is a true story. In the middle of a crisis and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj Zizek telephoned an academic colleague in Britain late at night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed at the opposition movement, in which Zizek and the NSK, the Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Zizek is on the phone during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Zizek goes on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in every workplace a "commissar" has been appointed to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Zizek is painting. And it is even worse than that, Zizek says, for even in the universities, in every department a commissar has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Zizek then informs him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department, Zizek says, "I am the commissar". "

Rambling Thomas, in a comment at Jodi's I cite, writes:

"This point came up in the seminar I am, by coincidence, taking with Zizek, where he gave an example that seems to tie some of these ideas together. Zizek's example of subversive conformity was of his being a member of a dissident group in Slovenia, publishing a newspaper the day after a rigged Soviet election, with the headline reading something like "Surprise Landslide Victory for Communist Party!" The headline is an example of conformity insofar as the elections are supposed not to have been rigged; therefore the huge margin of victory is supposedly a "surprise." Yet, of course, the gesture is subversive since everybody knows (but is not allowed to say) that the elections are rigged: the headline in fact reveals the absurd open secret of the rigged elections."

It is probably the case that Zizek has articulated assorted permutations of this Slovenian election story (and whether we want to believe it or not is another matter): another version of this incident during the elections in the 1980s was that the opposition published a newspaper on the eve of the poll with a headline that predicted a victory for the League of Slovene Communists. Zizek and his colleagues were immediately rounded up by the authorities to be questioned, but they had done nothing wrong, "merely" drawn attention to the fact that it was of course inconceivable that the Communists would not win an election.

Clearly, art collective NSK and Zizek had noticed something crucial about the way the ideological apparatus worked in Yugoslavia, that it required the phenomenon of "dissidence" as a kind of buffer zone between individuals and the state. The knowing cynical distance from the ruling ideology, the fact that everyone knew it was a sham, actually enabled it to function, actually constituted its very condition of possibility, ideology's necessary dialectics. People could complain and complain and complain about how voting never changed anything, that you could never believe what politicians said, that conforming with the regulations was bureaucratic idiocy, but this did not stop them from conforming, from accepting things and even being happier to do so when they "knew" they had no real part in it, that they had some precious individual Space to which they could always retire or escape, some inner sacred core or hard sanctified ("trans-ideological") kernal that was forever immunised from the ritual spectacles.

Overidentification [as a political strategy, "pretending to pretend"], on the other hand, takes the system at its word and plays so close to it that it cannot bear your participation. In that way you are much more subversive, much more dangerous.

Some more far-flung illustrations, from Slovenia, from America, from Ireland:

One of the component groups of NSK (Neue Collectivism) got an award in 1987 for their poster celebrating the day of youth and Tito's birthday. But this celebratory poster quickly turned into the "poster scandal" when it was discovered that the NSK had submitted an old Nazi poster, leading to the strategy of overidentification, its successful application, immediately becoming politically charged.

In the US, political satirist Michael Moore some years ago [as portrayed in his TV documentary, Moore's TV Nation] entered an unusual candidate in the US Congressional elections: a Ficus plant. He was able to do this because he followed to the letter all of the rules, regulations, bureaucratic procedures and so on of the electoral process. The Ficus plant, needless to say, was duly elected, the competing candidates being conservative and "uninteresting."

The Fellowship of the Ficus Plants

In Ireland some years ago, a group of students entered as a candidate in student elections at a Dublin university a tape-recorded VOICE [analogies with V for Vendetta aside, this is also reminiscent of the Voice in both Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse and David Cronenberg's Videodrome, recordings masquerading as "real people"] of some registered but mysterious, hermetic student, who may or may not have actually existed. Once again, the Voice was duly elected, the competing candidates being conservative and "uninteresting."

While it is clear that in both of these cases, the organisers of the prank or "stunt" were simply "pretending" [engaging in mere pomo irony, a knowingly hollow miming of the electoral process] in order to draw attention to the sheer poverty of the policies of competing election candidates, they (Moore and the students) nevertheless still believed in the underlying integrity of the electoral process itself, in democracy as Master Signifier, ie "If only we had better candidates, all would be well with democracy" etc. There criticism amounts to a simple, modern variation of "The Emperor Has No Clothes" viz, "Political Candidates Have No Personal Integrity" : but the undressing of the King or the unmasking of politicians does not work - though not because their personality or charisma is indestructible, but because the unmasking only destroys their personality, their personal charisma, not the power of the symbolic place of the King or of Democracy —when we undress him, we realize that "he is not truly a king" or "he is not a worthy political candidate". . . and then endeavour to proceed in the search for a true one. [So in political fetishism, as with commodity fethishism, it is never enough simply to disavow the politician (or the commodity)].

The paradox in both cases here, and uncritically accepted by everyone involved, was that both non-human/undead "winning" candidates were deemed invalid, were subsequently rejected by assorted authories - governing bodies, election-oversight commitees etc, anti-democratic rulings that were never subsequently contested by anyone, the runner-up "human" candidates instead being deemed elected. The effect of the "scam" was thus paradoxically to undermine democracy, ostensibly in order to defend it but actually in order to protect something else entirely ("But you can't have a dumb plant as a political leader. It's not human!"), the fantasy of a kind of sentimental humanism that imagines a "real human being" behind such media constructs as the likes of Arnold Schzwarzenegger and George Bush, or anyone else.

Of course, a proper [pretending to pretend] political strategy of over-identification would, in the two examples above, have challenged the final rulings of the extra-legal bodies, the dismissals of the winning "candidates," a move that would continue to over-identify with the very form of democracy itself, so nihilating, so dismissing its phantasmatic underside or kernal of support, the "real essential person, the inner ego-self" that is imputed to lie behind, to reside in, the candidates.

I thing Jodi further teases out these points in her analysis of the Zelig-like, human-cameleon performance of the Mime artist: " ... for, it is the mime who draws our attention to the absorption to a form in conformity, as if to tell us that a conforming that understands itself as retaining an original element that does not conform, a specialness that is held apart from the form, a uniqueness that is retained, is, in fact, pure, complete conformity, conformity as such. Full and complete conformity is that conformity that thinks it is not full and complete. The mime, by virtue of the fullness of his mimcry, draws out the specificity in an individual's conformity: the specificity that, ostensibly precious, the mime demonstrates to be meaningless, idiotic. The mime, then, isolates as a meaningless kernel of enjoyment that sense of individuality constitutive of full conformity."

The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'. Close analysis of even the most 'totalitarian' ideological edifice inevitably reveals that, not everything in it is 'ideology' (in the popular sense of the 'politically instrumentalized legitimization of power relations'): in every ideological edifice, there is a kind of 'trans-ideological' kernel, since, if an ideology is to become operative and effectively 'seize' individuals, it has to batten on and manipulate some kind of 'trans-ideological' vision which cannot be reduced to a simple instrument of legitimizing pretensions to power (notions and sentiments of solidarity, justice, belonging to a community, etc.). Is not a kind of 'authentic' vision discernible even in Nazism (the notion of the deep solidarity which keeps the 'community of people' together), not to mention Stalinism? The point is thus not that there is no ideology without a trans-ideological 'authentic' kernel but rather, that it is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology 'workable'.

Conformity, Over-Identification, Perversion, Sublimity ...

2006-04-25T00:36:00.000+01:00

Jodi, at I cite, writes:
The Conformist

Recently (in a thread on Long Sunday as well as elsewhere), I was accused of being a conformist. I say accused because the overall tone of the remark was neither blandly descriptive nor particularly complementary. I've wondered about this. What does it mean to conform and why might conforming be behaviour seen as unlaudable? Why might the appellation conformist be an insult?

On one level, it seems obvious: the conformist seems not to think for herself, at best, and to be an Eichmann-like follower, at worst. "Just following orders." Here "conform" suggests compliance, obedience, and, perhaps, more, compliance and obedience without thought. But is it really so simple?

We might also do well to recognize that conform means to adapt or adjust. So one who conforms is also one who adapts to certain circumstances. "When in Rome...." It could be an attribute, say, of being a good guest or traveler. From this perspective, a failure to conform might be more than simply irritating, it might also suggest the ugly American insisting that everything go his way. "Where are my hamburgers?" Some dictionaries include "to be in harmony" in their definition of conform. There is something pleasant, well, harmonious, about this way of thinking about conformity, as if its lack or absence were dissonant, jarring, unpleasant.

A failure to conform might be the ultimate in arrogance, a making of oneself into an exemption, she to whom no norm applies, she who is above all norms, she who acts as she pleases when and where she pleases. The non-conformist here makes her own rules, but it is hard to call these rules sense they really refer to an absence of rule, to being above all rule, being unruly. But surely this is not a particularly attractive or admirable way of being, this diva-like quality of demanding specific kinds of sparkling water and only, only green M&Ms. It may well be original, unique. And that is no doubt a good thing because too much of such dissonance is cacophonous, maddening, a kind of madness.

We might do well to notice that speaking and writing require conformity, that the pleasures of irony, dadaism, and jokes play with our conformity, drawing us out of it, making it strange to us, and then, releasing us back to this conformity, now somewhat different, not quite the same.

Is it so easy to conform, in these times of symbolic inefficiency? I moved a lot as a child--living in South Carolina, Washington, Louisana, Nebraska, and Texas before I was 5. Conforming, adapting, was pretty useful. And, is it possible that each conforming movement becomes a kind of addition, a change, a way of making conforming itself more complicated, more multi-layered, less simple: how, for example, to be at home enough to be elsewhere? If we are elsewhere, unadapted, have we really gone anywhere or haven't we brought too much of what and where we were before with us, so much in fact that we can't be in another place?

And, then, what about Zizek? What I have in mind is of course being fully in ideology, playing by the rules, fully identifying with the system. Zizek frequently points out that this full identification, conformity, is one way of disrupting a system, of giving up that point of distance or non-identity that actually supports it. Really playing by the rules can be subversive of these very rules insofar as it ignores the obscene superego supplement.

Three different responses:

[1] Conformity: Could the attractions of quotidian conformity revolve around the fear that if one does effectively break up the chains of the symbolic order, one is expelled into the void of psychosis [a failed "subjective destitution"]? Or, how is it possible not only to resist effectively, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network - the Lacanian "Big Other" - which predetermines the only space within which the subject can exist?

And this when such ordinary conformity is seen as perversion: the basic structure of perversion is that you perceive yourself as the instrument of others' jouissance. This is why, for example, Don Giovanni is a pervert. What is his seductive magic? His gift is not that he is beautiful, but that he can guess or discern the fantasy of each woman, and he tries to stage that fantasy. Which is why Lacan says une par une--une pour une; for each her own specific fantasy. For the pervert is totally void, he is there only to serve the other, to be the slave of the other's fantasy. This is very nicely expressed by Lacan: the formula of perversion is the simple reversal of the formula of fantasy. This is exactly what [supposedly] is meant to happen in psychoanalysis.

The pervert self-consciously identifies, not with the symptom but with the fantasy as a program, and thereby fills out the petit objet a, whereas the Lacanian analyst holds it empty and receptive in some way to the future.

Mr Z again: "This [the passage from desire to drive, from fantasy to symtom -- P] is what people usually overlook when they concentrate only on generalities. Lacan discusses this in the mysterious final pages of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964; he says that when you go through fantasy, la traversee du fantasme, you lose desire, you become pure drive. Again, when people talk about the truth of desire, they simply overlook that. In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan defines the final, concluding moment of analysis as the one when you step out, when you don't have desire any more, in this sense. You become the being of the drive; you pass from the side of the divided subject to the side of the object. Which is why the analyst is an object in this sense. I also agree with you if your point is that this is in a way extremely close, almost imperceptibly close, to the perverse position. Although the gap is there--absolute but almost imperceptible."

[2] Over-Identification [from Rand to the Neo-cons]: Zizek argues, "Ayn Rand’s fascination for male figures displaying an absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best imaginable confirmation of Sylvia Plath’s famous line, ‘every woman adores a Fascist’. Is, however, such a quick, ‘politically correct’ dismissal of her work really accurate? The properly subversive dimension of her ideological procedure is not to be underestimated: Rand fits into the line of ‘overconformist’ authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself, as the title of one of her books (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) suggests; according to her, today, the truly heretical thing is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare, etc. sugar-coating. So what Pascal and Racine were to Jansenism, what Kleist was to German nationalist militarism, what Brecht was to Communism, Rand is to American capitalism ... It was perhaps her Russian origins and upbringing that enabled her to formulate directly the fantasmatic kernel of American capitalist ideology."

This formulation made a lot of sense during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when much of the world was moving to the left in response to reactionary if pure over-ideological identifications like Rand's, but what about today, when Rand's rantings have now become the [near-global] socio-political status quo?

[3] [Symbolic] Sublimity (Principles): Groucho Marx, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?"

"The logic is here the same as that of Anne Frank who, in her diaries, expresses belief in the ultimate goodness of man in spite of the horrors accomplished by men against Jews in World War II: what renders such an assertion of belief (in the essential goodness of Man; in the truly human character of the Soviet regime) sublime, is the very gap between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, i.e. the active will to disavow the actual state of things. Perhaps therein resides the most elementary meta-physical gesture: in this refusal to accept the real in its idiocy, to disavow it and to search for Another World behind it. The big Other is thus the order of lie, of lying sincerely. And it is in this sense that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" [from Yeats' The Second Coming, 1920-- P]: even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence, their full engagement in the symbolic ritual, while "the worst," the mob, engage in (racist, religious, sexist...) fanaticism? Is this opposition not a good description of today's split between tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of "passionate intensity"?"

All of this seemingly nonsensical logic succinctly summarises the operation of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-injunction, the cultural construction, takes precedence over the direct reality of the person who assumes or projects this mask and/or internalises this injunction. Moreover, this whole operation seems to involve the structure of fetishist disavowal: "I know perfectly well that Humans do horrible things, but nevertheless I believe Humanity to be essentially Good and to be capable of Good", or "I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him". In other words, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen or, indeed, the reality of scientific empiricism, of "the facts", of the Reality Principle. The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge - if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.

"What a cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality."

Iran Invasion Will Not Be Announced

2006-04-22T01:58:00.000+01:00

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." ===> John Donne (1573-1631)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." ===> Sir Edmund Burke (1729-1797) - (Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770)

A Path to Peace with Iran
By Scott Ritter

The problems that plague Washington DC on the issue of Iran are the same problems that haunt America overall regarding Iraq -- no clear understanding of why we as a nation are doing what we are doing where we are doing it, and absolutely no system of accountability for those who are implicated, directly through their actions or indirectly through abrogation of duties and responsibilities, in embroiling America in such senseless conflict.

1 Million Dead Iranians
By Chris Floyd

When this attack comes -- either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or as the precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq -- there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no congressional hearings, no public debate. The already-issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president. He picks up the phone, he says, "Go," and in 12 hours' time, up to 1 million Iranians will be dead.

Don't Impeach Bush. Commit Him: A Maniacal Messianic Prepares to Fulfill His Destiny
By Ted Rall

Until I read Seymour Hersh's expose in The New Yorker and subsequent follow-up coverage by other journalists about the Bush Administration's plans to start a war against Iran, I had dismissed talk of George W. Bush's messianism as so much Beltway chatter. True, he hears voices, even claiming that God and Jesus Christ talk to him. "I believe God wants me to run for president," he told a friend in Texas. Eschewing mainstream religion, he routinely parrots the apocalyptic ravings of fringe Christianist cults:

Cheney has tapped Iranian expatriate, arms dealer to surveil discussions with Iran:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, three intelligence sources identified the Iran-Contra middleman as having been put back on the payroll, acting as a human intelligence asset and monitoring any movement in discussions about Iran's alleged burgeoning nuclear weapons program.

U.S. strike on Iran could make Iraq look like a warm-up bout

TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

Poison-laced missiles raining down on U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the downing of a U.S. passenger airliner, suicide bombers in major cities, perhaps unleashing their deadly payload in a shopping mall food court. It could be 9/11 all over again. Or worse.

Iran suicide bombers 'ready to hit Britain'

By Marie Colvin, Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter

IRAN has formed battalions of suicide bombers to strike at British and American targets if the nation's nuclear sites are attacked. According to Iranian officials, 40,000 trained suicide bombers are ready for action.

Iran was not ordered to Stop Enrichment

By Mike Whitney

It's easy to get confused about developments in Iran because the media does everything in its power to obfuscate the facts and then spin the details in way that advances American policy objectives. But, let's be clear; the Security Council did NOT order Iran to stop enriching uranium.

What President Ahmadinejad Said About Israel and Iran's Nuclear Program: Full text of President's Ahmadinejad address

"Palestine is the meeting point of right and wrong. Freedom for Palestine is the present aspiration of humanity. We must believe that good will prevail and evil will disappear. We must believe that Palestine will be free soon."

U.S. Program Is Directed at Altering Iran's Politics
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

As the Bush administration confronts the Tehran government over its suspected nuclear weapons program and accusations that it supports terrorism, a newly created office of Iranian affairs in the State Department is poring over applications for a rapidly expanding program to change the political process inside Iran.

Iran years away from having nukes':

US intelligence chief John Negroponte has said Iran's resumption of uranium enrichment is "troublesome" but the country is still years away from having enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon.

Russia toughens opposition to Iran sanctions :

Hardening its opposition to sanctions against Iran, Russia said on Friday the U.N. Security Council should only consider such measures if it had proof the Islamic Republic was trying to build nuclear weapons.

Russia backs Iran's nuclear programme:

Russia today offered its most outspoken support yet of the controversial nuclear programme in Iran, its neighbour and trading partner.

Russia Will Not Agree to Iran Sanctions Without Proof :

Russia says again it will not agree to sanctions against Iran until Moscow sees hard evidence that Tehran's nuclear program is not for peaceful purposes

Taking matters in hand:

Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and head of the Supreme National Security Council, tells Amira Howeidy that Iran does not need nuclear weapons to promote its influence in the region and that punishing Iran for pursuing a nuclear programme will damage everyone

Bush raises UN action against Iran:

US President George W. Bush said he has discussed with Chinese President Hu Jintao the possibility of the United Nations passing a motion against Iran that could order sanctions or action going up to military action.

US prepared to go it alone over Iran :

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has invoked self-defence as a potential justification for military intervention in Iran

Russians withhold judgment on Iran :

Russia will decide its stance on the Iranian nuclear crisis based on a report next week by the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the deputy foreign minister said today.

Brazil follows Iran's nuclear path, but without the fuss :

As Iran faces international pressure over developing the raw material for nuclear weapons, Brazil is quietly preparing to open its own uranium-enrichment center, capable of producing exactly the same fuel.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman: I'd Support Iran Attack:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Tuesday that he would back a U.S. airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities if diplomatic options fail, becoming the first Democrat to announce his support for such a move.

Gwynne Dyer: Oil: the party is over:

Welcome to the world of US$70-per-barrel oil. That's if there is no crisis in the Gulf over Iran's nuclear ambitions. If there is, then get ready for US$140 a barrel.

Does Iran's President Want Israel Wiped Off The Map - Does He Deny The Holocaust? This is a must read:

By Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann
Translation to English: Erik Appleby:

How Media Have Distorted the Facts in Support of an Attack on Iran.

When "Diplomacy" Means War:

By Norman Solomon

One of the nation's leading pollsters, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, wrote a few weeks ago that among Americans "there is little potential support for the use of force against Iran." This month the White House has continued to emphasize that it is committed to seeking a diplomatic solution. Yet the U.S. government is very likely to launch a military attack on Iran within the next year. How can that be?

Lock him away to stop the next war

By Phillip Adams

WE cannot wait any longer for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Far more efficient to have Bush certified. There is no need for further debate on his mental state. The US President is bonkers.

Stop Us Before We Kill Again!

By Bernard Weiner

So, if you're wondering whether the U.S. will back off from attacking Iran, or whether corporations will no longer be given the ability to dictate Administration environmental policy, or whether domestic spying on U.S. citizens will cease, or whether Scalia might recuse himself on cases he's already pre-judged -- if you still harbor any or all of those illusions, forget about it.

Forget the Middle East:
North America Harbors the World's Most Dangerous Terrorists

By Jason Miller

A Messiah complex, severely stunted emotional intelligence and profound ignorance are the defining characteristics of the man capable of making nuclear holocaust a reality within minutes.

Most Americans Do Not Trust Bush on Iran: .

54 per cent of respondents say they do not trust George W. Bush to make the right decision about whether the country should go to war with Iran or not.

US to call for freeze on Iran assets and visa curbs:

The US is pressing other world powers to consider what it called targeted sanctions against Iran as an April 30 United Nations deadline looms for Tehran over its nuclear program.

Iranian official's presence in U.S. queried:

The Bush administration yesterday was at a loss to explain the rare presence in Washington of an Iranian government official who slipped into the United States under mysterious circumstances, apparently to attend a scholarly conference.

U.S. envoy: Iran sanctions discussed:

A U.S. diplomat said Tuesday that envoys from the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany discussed sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, but failed to reach agreement on how to proceed further.

"New urgency" to curb Iran - U.S. official:

Russia said on Wednesday it wanted to refrain from taking action before a U.N. deadline set for Tehran to halt uranium enrichment expired, but a top U.S. official believed other countries were inching towards action.

[ .............................. Abbas Kiarostami and friend .....................]

The U.S. Nuclear Bunker Buster:

3 Million will die as result of attack:

Flash presentation. Must watch

Russia will deliver air defense systems to Iran - top general :

At the end of 2005, Russia concluded a $700-million contract on the delivery of 29 Tor M1 air defense systems to Iran.

China, Russia welcome Iran into the fold:

"The real intention behind the US fueling the Iran issue is to prompt the UN to impose sanctions against Iran, and to pave the way for a regime change in that country."

Bush won't rule out nuclear strike on Iran By Edmund Blair

President Bush refused on Tuesday to rule out nuclear strikes against Iran if diplomacy fails to curb the Islamic Republic's atomic ambitions.

U.S. refuses to denie report of Iran strike plans:

The Pentagon declined to comment Monday on a report that US military planning for Iran began in 2002 and has been continually updated since.

Gordon Prather: Busting empty bunkers:

Military planners told the White House that if they wanted to be sure to destroy the underground uranium-enrichment bunker at Natanz - which is to eventually hold those 50,000 gas-centrifuges, but is now empty - they'd have to nuke it.

Prominent U.S. Physicists Send Warning Letter to President Bush:

Thirteen of the nation's most prominent physicists have written a letter to President Bush, calling U.S. plans to reportedly use nuclear weapons against Iran "gravely irresponsible" and warning that such action would have "disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world."

Fallout: The human cost of nuclear catastrophe:

Flash presentation

Manufacturing consent for war:

Israel Warns of New 'Axis of Terror':

Ambassador Dan Gillerman cautioned that a new "axis of terror" Iran, Syria and the Hamas-run Palestinian government was sowing the seeds of the first world war of the 21st century.

Lieberman: US could attack Iran's nukes:

The US is probably incapable of completely destroying the Iranian nuclear program, but as a last resort it could attempt to knock out "some of the components" in order to "delay and deter it," Senator Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate and a serving member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has told The Jerusalem Post.

Israel may have to go it alone on Iran: report :

The head of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, poised to enter the next cabinet, said Monday that Israel may have to take its own pre-emptive action to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons

Eric Margolis : Countdown Over Iran:

It's both fascinating and dismaying watching the manufactured `crisis' over Iran reach new intensity each week. Iran poses no real military threat to anyone, but listening to the Bush Administration or the US media one would think that that Tehran was about to unleash a nuclear holocaust on the world.

Report - IAEA informed of Iran's P-2 centrifuge programmes:

The New York Times had quoted United States security officials as saying Iran's use of P-2 centrifuges was worrisome as the process would not only accelerate the enrichment process but production of an atomic bomb.

Congressman Ron Paul: Sanctions against Iran :

We cannot underestimate the irrational, almost manic desire of some neoconservatives to attack Iran one way or another, even if it means crippling a major source of oil and destabilizing the worldwide economy.

Bombs That Would Backfire

By RICHARD CLARKE and STEVEN SIMON

The parallels to the run-up to to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was "no war plan on my desk" despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion. Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.

The US, Iran and the End of the International Order

By Jussi Sinnemaa

As the IAEA has repeatedly acknowledged, Iran is not in violation of any of her legal obligations as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In fact, Iran has allowed far more intrusive international inspections of her nuclear facilities than required by the NPT. Iran remains the only country to have done so.

The Disintegration of Iran :

The US intends to separate the oil rich province of Khouzestan from Iran and establish a small government in that region in its drive to control Middle-East oil. But is this fear realistic, or just part of the imagination of some Iranians?

Eric Margolis: A war of nerves:

The Bush Administration has used Iran's gleeful announcement that it enriched uranium to 3.5 per cent (83 per cent is needed for nuclear weapons), to generate a major US-Iranian crisis seven months before national mid-term elections.

Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner on Iran War Plans:

"The Issue is Not Whether the Military Option Would Be Used But Who Approved the Start of Operations Already"

Rafsanjani says Gulf countries will not assist U.S. if it attacks Iran :

"Reports about plans for an American attack on Iran are incorrect. We are certain that Americans will not attack Iran because the consequences would be too dangerous," former president Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an appearance in the Kuwait parliament.

[ ................. Scene from Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold (2003) ..........]

U.S. could attack Iran next year - Russian expert :

"If [the U.S.] ventures a military operation, it will conduct it next year after thorough political, military and propaganda preparations," Alexei Arbatov, head of the International Security Center in Moscow, told RIA Novosti.

U.S. backup plan: invade iran by land, air, water strikes :

The United States began planning a full-scale military campaign against Iran that involves missile strikes, a land invasion and a naval operation to establish control over the Strait of Hormuz even before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a former US intelligence analyst disclosed on Sunday.

William M. Arkin: The Pentagon Preps for Iran:

In early 2003, even as U.S. forces were on the brink of war with Iraq, the Army had already begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran.

Blair refuses to back Iran strike:

TONY Blair has told George Bush that Britain cannot offer military support to any strike on Iran, regardless of whether the move wins the backing of the international community, government sources claimed yesterday.

General says Iran's military ready "to project its power" :

A top Iranian military commander said on Friday that the Islamic Republic's Army and Revolutionary Guards "are today in a situation to make the Oppressor World [the United States and its allies] feel the great powers that are at Iran's disposal", the state-run news agency Mehr reported.

Bush's Insane First Strike Policy:

If You Don't Want to Get Whacked, You'd Better Get Your Nation a Nuke

General Bush's lose-lose Iranian war options:

There is something unreal about the bellicose statements coming from some sources in the Bush administration towards Iran.

Rice hints at Iran attack:

THE United Nations must consider action against Iran which could lead to the use of military force, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last night.

Retired colonel claims U.S. military operations are already 'underway' in Iran :

During an interview on CNN Friday night, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner claimed that U.S. military operations are already 'underway' inside Iran

Israel's Peres Says Iran Leader Will Meet Saddam's Fate: -

Former Israeli premier Shimon Peres says the president of Iran is destined to meet the same fate as Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader deposed in a U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Iran: 'Israel will be annihilated by one storm':

MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, caused further international outrage yesterday by calling Israel a "rotten, dried tree" which he predicted would be annihilated by "one storm".

Iran Issues Warning to US:

"You can start a war but it won't be you who finishes it," said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards and among the regime's most powerful figures.

Rice: US seeks enforcement power against Iran:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the UN Security Council's handling of the Iranian nuclear issue will be a test of the international community's credibility.

Russian Military Chief Says Iran Far From Nuclear Bomb :

Russia's chief of military staff says that he is confident that Iran's current nuclear activities will "not allow it the possibility, either in the near or distant future, to make a nuclear weapon."

Duma member: US, Israel enemies of Iran nuclear program:

Member of Russian State Duma Victor Alksnis said today that Israel and the United States are real enemies of Iran's peaceful nuclear program.

War Against Iran, What War Against Iran?

2006-04-09T03:09:00.000+01:00

[Counterfactual] Advertisement published in Britain's Financial Times a few days ago

[Given that many nuclear devices are currently in the hands of war criminals (US government and Israel's Zionist government), will the Financial Times be affording Iran, a country without nuclear weapons, an opportunity to advertise accordingly in its newspaper? Is the Pope a Nazi paedophile? Could us Western Racists even imagine it?]

Extended Media Update on the Continuing Iranian Crisis :

["Oh, but why aren't the BBC and ITV and CNN and Fox reporting on all this if its true; after all, they're the authorities, they're the independent medjaa that have colonised our world-view, they wouldn't betray us or anything would they? Unless they had a reason, surely?"].

The Iran Plans

One of the military's initial option plans, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, By Seymour M. Hersh

Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

You Can't Win One War, Start Another
By Paul Craig Roberts

The Bush regime currently has wars underway in Afghanistan and in Iraq and can bring neither to a conclusion. Undeterred by these failures, the Bush regime gives every indication that it intends to start a war with Iran, a country that is capable of responding to US aggression over a broader front than the Sunni resistance has mounted in Iraq.

Iran: The Next Neocon Target
HON. RON PAUL OF TEXASBefore the U.S. House of Representatives , Windows Video and transcript

Once again we're unilaterally declaring a pre-emptive war against a country and a people that have not harmed us and do not have the capacity to do so. And don't expect Congress to seriously debate a declaration of war resolution. For the past 56 years Congress has transferred to the executive branch the power to go to war as it pleases, regardless of the tragic results and costs.

Bush 'planning nuclear Iran strike':

Article in New Yorker says that U.S. government is preparing a massive campaign to neutralize Iranian nuclear sites. Iranian President Ahmadinejad is compared in the White House to Hitler

Philip Giraldi: Deep Background :

It is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.

ElBaradei: Iran nuclear program not diverted :

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said here Thursday night his agency has not seen any indication that nuclear material in Iran has been diverted or is being diverted to develop nuclear weapons.

US, Allies Mull Bypassing UN To Pressure Iran:

U.S. officials and allies are talking about forming a " coalition of the willing" to bring pressure against Iran's nuclear program, citing dimming hopes for tough action from the United Nations, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

U.S. Officials Are Mulling Iran Strikes, Experts Say:

Key players in the Bush administration think a military confrontation with Iran is unavoidable, leading to stepped up military planning for such a prospect, according to several experts and recently departed senior government officials.

Why Israel can't wipe out Iran's nuke plants :

IRAN still poses a threat to Israel - as well as the Western and Arab worlds. That was the message conveyed by the former Israeli ambassador to Zimbabwe, Gershon Gan, at a UJIA-arranged talk at Liverpool's Harold House.

Moscow issues West a warning :

Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Thursday warned the West against isolating his country from helping to broker disputes with Iran and other conflicts in the Middle East.

American Jewish Committee Pimps War With Iran:
The above advert appeared in the Financial Times: UK

AIPAC Pimps War With Iran:

The video and maps below are intended to help you better understand the escalating threat that is Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Two B-2s could take out Iran's nuclear assets':

Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions will be history by the time US President George W Bush leaves office, said a report published here.

Iran conducts fourth missile test:

Iran successfully test-fired an air-launched anti- ship missile Wednesday during war games in the Gulf, the fourth launch in six days, state television reported.

Iran's Persian Gulf oil bourse on track:

Iran is still insisting on opening a Persian Gulf oil bourse with the southern Iranian island Kish as its base, state-television reported Saturday. 'The issue has already been agreed upon and the oil ministry has been instructed to open this bourse in the Persian Gulf island of Kish,' Economic and Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari said.

If one side in a conflict goes nuclear, the other is bound to follow suit :

The Iranian crisis can only be understood as the inevitable result of Israel's US-backed WMD monopoly in the region

US blueprint for 125 nuclear bombs a year:

THE Bush Administration has unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the US's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing facility.

[Oh, yeah, BTW, Bush and Friends on Democracy, Freedom etc:]

We support the election process, we support democracy, but that doesn't mean we have to support governments that get elected as a result of democracy. =======>President G. Bush - Washington, D.C., Mar. 29, 2006

US House Passes Palestinian Anti-Terror Act :

The House International Relations Committee on Thursday, by a vote of 36-2 (McCollum & Blumenauer voting no), approved H.R. 4681, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, legislation that bans all non-humanitarian aid to the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority (PA).

Silence in class :

University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?

Hamas: EU aid freeze is blackmail: The Hamas-led Palestinian government has denounced a move by the European Union to suspend aid payments, saying it is a form of blackmail which will only hurt ordinary civilians.

War Against Iran, April 2006

Biological Threat and Executive Order 13292, By Jorge Hirsch

The US promised Russia and China that the UN Security Council statement just approved will not be a trigger for military action after 30 days; true to its promise, the US will attack before the 30-day deadline imposed by the UNSC for Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activity, i.e. before the end of April. The "justification" is likely to be an alleged threat of imminent biological attack with Iran's involvement.

Will The U.S. Nuke Iran?

Professor of Physics Highlights The Dangers

New US policy to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries has been officially formulated in two US government documents Nuclear Posture Review delivered to Congress in December 2001 and Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations dated March 15, 2005.

Iran says it has successfully test-fired a missile able to avoid radar: -

Iran successfully test-fired on Friday a missile with the ability to avoid radar and hit several targets simultaneously, the airforce chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards said.

Iran: Scenarios of an American strike:

The risks are great if Washington's neo-cons choose military options to prevent Iran from blocking US imperial designs for the Middle East

Nuking innocence:

Iran is being set up for "an unprovoked nuclear attack"

Manufacturing consent for war: UN Security Council calls on Iran to suspend enrichment-related activities:

Expressing serious concern that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is unable to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, the United Nations Security Council today called upon that country to re-establish full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.

UN demands Iran stop uranium enrichment work:

Iran remained defiant, saying that it was not seeking an atomic bomb and regardless of assurances, the United States and others would find new reasons to fault Tehran.

Iran rejects call to halt enrichment:

Iran refused Thursday to comply with a UN Security Council demand to freeze uranium enrichment, defying a call by major world powers to curb its nuclear program or face isolation.

World powers discuss next steps in Iran crisis:

Six world powers were gathering in Berlin on Thursday to discuss the next steps in dealing with Iran's nuclear programme, with Russia and China looking for assurances that there are no plans to use force against Tehran.

Russian warning over Iran crisis :
Russia has warned it will not support any attempts to use force to resolve the stand-off over Iran's controversial nuclear programme.

Iran to hold large-scale naval war games:

Today, Iran is calling for its rightful demands with strength and national unity and these exercises will show an increase of strength and preparedness, the navy commander added.

Government in secret talks about strike against Iran :

By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, 04/02/06, "Telegraph" -- --

The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran. A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran. It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme. Tomorrow's meeting will be attended by Gen Sir Michael Walker, the chief of the defence staff, Lt Gen Andrew Ridgway, the chief of defence intelligence and Maj Gen Bill Rollo, the assistant chief of the general staff, together with officials from the Foreign Office and Downing Street. The International Atomic Energy Authority, the nuclear watchdog, believes that much of Iran's programme is now devoted to uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, technologies that could provide material for nuclear bombs to be developed in the next three years. The United States government is hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little international support. British military chiefs believe an attack would be limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants - a land assault is not being considered at the moment. But confirmation that Britain has started contingency planning will undermine the claim last month by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that a military attack against Iran was "inconceivable". Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, insisted, during a visit to Blackburn yesterday, that all negotiating options - including the use of force - remained open in an attempt to resolve the crisis. More ...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Blix: Iran Years Away From Nuclear Bomb:

Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said Monday that Iran is a least five years away from developing a nuclear bomb, leaving time to peacefully negotiate a settlement.

US will Find Another Excuse to Target Iran :

The United States is firm in its plans to launch a military operation against Iran, said Kazim Jalali, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament's Commission of Foreign Affairs, adding the United States would find another reason for its military operation even if the nuclear plants were immediately shut down.

Iran to test more weapons in wargames: TV:

Iran said on Monday it would test fire a powerful torpedo and more missiles as part of a week of wargames in the Gulf, the spokesman for the naval manoeuvres told state television.And then some propaganda from the war-mongering hysterics.

No more pussyfooting around Iran:

Not only is Iran arming paramilitary groups in neighbouring states, it has been implicated in terrorist actions as far afield as London and Buenos Aires. To borrow a metaphor from Lenin, Iran is exporting its internal contradictions.

And Prior To The March 2006 Deadline [Summary Recap]:

As Iranbodycount publishes its findings Iran Consequences Of War: "This briefing paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the likely nature of US or Israeli military action that would be intended to disable Iran's nuclear capabilities. It outlines both the immediate consequences in terms of loss of human life, facilities and infrastructure, and also the likely Iranian responses, which would be extensive", a US poll [Americans think Iran may use nukes] reports that eight out of 10 respondents predicted Iran would provide a nuclear weapon to terrorists to attack the United States or Israel. Six out of 10 respondents said Iran itself would deploy nuclear weapons against the United States ... as Ray McGovern asks Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran? - With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"-like torture, for example.

[... John Pilger [Iran: the next war]: "Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes." ...]

Then there's former UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who has recently said [Iran may need force, warns Hurd] that Britain cannot "realistically" rule out using military force against Iran over its nuclear programme.

Then there's Russia: Amid the escalating crisis around Iran's nuclear programme, Russia said last week [Russia confirms missile defence contract with Iran] that it will still arm Tehran with missiles that can secure nuclear facilities from attacks ... while Russian political expert Mikhail Delyagin [Russian Political Expert Predicts US Missile Attack on Iran] speculates that the U.S. will launch a missile attack against Iran this summer ... as Russia voices strong opposition to sanctions against Iran [Russian Foreign Minister voiced here Wednesday his country's strong opposition to any possible sanctions against Iran] ... as Russia Warns U.S. Against Striking Iran : Russia's top military chief today warned the United States against launching a military strike against Iran and a top diplomat voiced hope that close cooperation with China could help resolve the Tehran nuclear crisis.

Then there's China: China said last week [China welcomes Iran-Russia nuclear talks] that it welcomed talks between Iran and Russia next week on plans to defuse the crisis over Tehran's atomic programme, but refused to say whether it would join the meeting.

And Iran's responses: Ahmadinejad vows [Iran poised to retaliate against UN referral] his country will continue on the road to victory, labels Bush warmonger who should be put on trial, while Iranian Vice President Esfandyar Rahim Mashaee said [Iran dismisses US threat over nukes] "We are not afraid of attacks by the United States or by other countries on Iran's nuclear installations because we have nothing to hide, we have no installations to produce nuclear weapons." ... as Iran resumes enrichment work: "Iran has continued its nuclear drive within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the NPT, but if we see that you want to deprive us of our right using these regulations, know that the people will revise their policy in this regard," Ahmadinejad said.

And the US/Israeli responses: [Mofaz: Iran combining radical platform with nuclear weapons - danger for Israel] ... Pimping a war [IDF Intelligence Chief claims Iran Implementing Concrete Plan to Destroy Israel] ... as US threatens Iran with new sanctions: Threatening new sanctions, the United States accused Iran on Wednesday of defying the world by resuming uranium enrichment for nuclear fuel without resolving suspicions it secretly wants to build atomic bombs ... meanwhile Rice Says Iran Is Openly Defying The World : Speaking at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rice said Washington is examining the full range of possible punitive sanctions on Iran, as she asks for $75M to foster democracy in Iran: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress on Wednesday for $75 million this year to build democracy in Iran, saying the U.S. must support Iranians who are seeking freedoms under what she called a radical regime. Another U.S. Coup In Iran? ... In a private meeting with European diplomats this week, a former senior U.S. official raised the idea of launching a dozen B2 bombers in an air raid aimed at crippling key Iranian nuclear facilities ...

Elsewhere, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says [Facing a potential nuclear holocaust at the hands of Iran] the United States must do everything in its power to bring about regime change there, even if it means invading that nation ... as the World Jewish Congress launches a campaign against Iran [World Jewish Congress launches anti-Iran campaign] following the nuclear crisis and the anti-Semitic statements of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Further, the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a resolution [House condemns Iran's nuclear program ] condemning Iran for its nuclear program, and urging the international community to apply sanctions to deny it the ability to develop atomic weapons ... Moreover, Bush now planning huge propaganda campaign in Iran: The Bush administration made an emergency request to Congress yesterday for a seven-fold increase in funding to mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Tehran government, in a further sign of the worsening crisis between Iran and the west ... and US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites: "This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months ... and again, Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn: Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country's nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists ... as the propaganda persists: Pentagon plans to derail Iranian atomic bomb test - Iran has drawn up designs for a deep underground tunnel with remote-controlled heat and pressure sensors as part of what Western intelligence officials believe are preparations for a secret atomic test.

The French response: Propaganda ? France accuses Iran over nukes: The French foreign minister has accused Iran of pursuing a clandestine military nuclear programme ... while French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy branded Iran's nuclear programme [Selling a war?: Iran nuclear programme is 'military']for the first time today as a "clandestine, military" project.

According to Mike Kress [The Urgency of Now: Stopping the War on Iran], the neo-cons will use their tool at the UN, Ambassador John Bolton, to help create an international crisis and thereby justify attacks on Iran. Though there's no evidence to prove that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, Iran's refusal to halt its lawful nuclear programs will become the pretext for America's next unnecessary war. And Thomas Harding argues ['10,000 would die' in A-plant attack on Iran]: More than 100 American bombers, many based on carriers in the Gulf, would take part in a huge simultaneous surprise air attack on 20 key nuclear and military facilities.

Finally, in its suitably well-timed wisdom Amnesty condemns Iran's treatment of ethnic minorities : The administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has come under severe criticism from Amnesty International in a report entitled "New government fails to address dire human rights situation", which was published this week.

Against The Postmodern Red Of The Liberal Communists

2006-03-31T15:14:00.000+01:00

Be SMART!!

Red Bono's flexible solution to world poverty and AIDS

Today's Question: What's the difference between these two pairs of "liberal communists": corporate "humanitarian" capitalists Bill Gates and George Soros, and crusading celebrity-rock-star venture capitalists Bono and Bob Geldof?

Nobody has to be vile, Slavoj Zizek.
From The London Review of Books (vol. 28, number 27, April 2006).
[Via I Cite] :

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

=======================>Round Up The Usual Suspects

Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.

Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.
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BoBonoism: Make BoBono History - Confronting the Geldof-Bono Obscenity [Via Dissensus]

"The repeated claim from onstage multi-millionaires that the audience were going to 'change history' simply by turning up and tuning in cheapens agency in every sense. Participating in a narcissistic, self-righteous Spectacle is not 'doing something'. Tony Parsons, of all people, made the very good point in The Mirror today that the generation of the Thirties and Forties did not expect Crosby and Sinatra to change the world - but, as he says, many of them had either risked or given up their lives to change things. ... What needs to be kept in mind is BOTH that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure AND that it would be nothing without our co-operation."===>MarK

The Make Macho-Posturing Kapital Whores History musick-celebritishy spectacle was essentially part of the Blair government's PR campaign surrounding the G8 meetings last July [or was it June, or maybe August, or maybe why should anyone bother to care?], a cynical campaign aided and abetted by the Bush regime, British NGOs, and quite unfortunately, those two blarney-babblers, the ultra-montane reactionary Kapitalists, Bob Geldof (wealth: 200 million [in pick your favourite currency]) and Bono/Paul Hewson (1 billion), both of whom run large venture capital outfits when not parading their egos on the world media's virtual stage.

The most influential player of Make Geldof History was Oxfam, a centrist-complacent NGO with close allegiance to the British government, in particular with British Chancellor Gordon Brown's office. Working closely with the Commission for Africa, which is chaired by, um, tyrannical ego-maniac Bob Geldof and run by batty Blair, nosey Brown, and Britain's overseas aid minister Hilary Beenie Benny, the official Make Bono History campaign ignorantly fell into supporting the neo-liberal agenda of the G8 leaders.

Meanwhile, calling George Bush a "sincere and passionate man," [making Michael Moore real envious] resting his head lovingly on Tony Blair's shoulder while posing for the media cameras, Bob "What about Paula, Bob?" Geldof joined Texan-Stetson Bono's tradition of delegitimizing the protesters and pandering to elite leaders, in particular two of the eight men who actively facilitate the poverty in the first place.

Geldof and Bono's actions not only dismissed the much more complicated and deeper critiques made by the G8 protesters, but also implicitly condoned the hypocritical decisions of the corporate and government elites made during that week alone. The Scottish government punished members of Parliament who spoke out in favor of protecting protesters' rights to peacefully dissent in Gleneagles. For an entire month, these MPs were banned from government buildings and their salaries as well as the salaries of their staff were taken away. While Bonol and GAdolf spoke from the sublime heavens about "saving" the Africans, the rock stars took no action to pressure the UK government to let across the African protesters who were being denied entry into the country and denied participation in the events at which they had been invited to speak. Worse, Geldof, on a panel at a press meeting and in front of the gathered world broadcast media, contemptibly dismissed as "offensive and outrageous" the comments of an African member of the panel, who had simply questioned the effectiveness of Make Geldof Rich History.

Moreover ["as if we didn't know"], the assumptions and recommendations manufactured by Bobbly's Commission for Africa will prove disastrous for Africa's workers, peasants, and the urban poor. These include the assumption that the impact of Western manoeuvers on Africa has been largely benign. There is a complete absence of criticism of the ongoing Western military interventions of the last half century, and the colonial exploits and brutality forced upon the peoples of African nations. The other damaging assumption of the Commission revolves around the premise that free trade and privatization are somehow the key to liberation for Africans. The International Monetary Fund is viewed as being able to "play an invaluable role" in clearing the way for "private sector investors." Private profit making is seen as the panacea to poverty: "Successful growth will be led by the private sector." The commission concludes that only by ridding themselves of barriers to free trade and exporting to the rest of the world can Africans work their way out of poverty. Yes, Bobo, "Make Poverty Permanent cuz it made me obscenely rich. And I like it."

Besides completely whitewashing the real story behind Africa's debt burden, which has deteriorated further post-Live8, and the continuous misery their policies impose on the rest of the world, Blair and Brown and the rest of the G8 leaders hoped to use the Make All The Little People, The Masses History events as a smokescreen for the crisis occurring in Iraq. Unfortunately, agents-of-Kapital Bono and Geldof wholeheartedly supported this move. Because of their facile and naïve view of the political situation, Bono and Geldof helped to take the heat off Bush and Blair at their weakest point, the Iraq war, which is strategically situated as the first in a long series of dominos set up by and for both Western administrations. If this domino falls, pressured by the global anti-war movement, then the long line of imperialist drives, including the debilitating imposed debt on Africa, has a much greater chance of falling, of being cancelled. Instead, with foolhardy optimism in a system and its pushers who have literally created the misery, the millionaire rock stars persist in criticizing protesters through name-calling and displays of ignorance about protesters' understanding of the situation as if ordinary people simply could not grasp the real story behind the debt.

"Ironically bolstered by the strength of the global anti-war movement's ability to draw out millions in the streets, Geldof organized Make Poverty History concerts all over the world and called for people to march in Edinburgh. As opposed to providing the real justice that South African activist Trevor Ngwane and others called for, however, Geldof instead used his impressive soapbox to call for patronizing charity, and a more than polite request to the G8 leaders to "play nice." In the same vein, Geldof also intentionally refused most African artists to play on his stages, saying they wouldn't draw crowds. Thus, he paternalistically reduced the people of Africa to uncultured children who need to be pitied, not empowered. He also privileged the minuscule numbers of the powerful ruling class into the position of being willing and able to change the world not the masses of ordinary people everywhere.

To make matters worse, Geldolf emailed an edict to each of the Live 8 performers, forbidding them from mentioning the Iraq War or saying anything that would "embarrass" Blair. As with the Make Everything History demonstration, this was a case of the millions of participants being more progressive than the organizers of the event.

It was also a perfect exemplification of class unconsciousness. From the stage, the wealthiest man on the planet, Bill Gates, along with the likes of Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Bob Geldof, positioned themselves as experts on Third World debt and poverty. Millionaires like Madonna, before performing, asked the crowd if they were ready for a "revolution." And perhaps the most egregious moment came when Chris Martin of the pop band Coldplay, commented that the Live 8 concerts were the most important events ever organized in human history."
===>Why Bono and Geldof Got It Wrong, VIRGINIA RODINO, Counterpunch.

"And still U2 - always U2. The pious priests of anti-punk. The sound of the Restoration. Anthemic pathos. Nothing will happen until U2 are destroyed, destroyed utterly. Until it is much more embarrassing and shameful to like U2 than it ever was to like ELP or Floyd." ===>MarK

And Geldof has apparently just been co-opted by Britain's Conservative Party as an advisor on global poverty: Geldof helps Tory poverty policy.

So that's all nicely wrapped up then ...

'This will not make poverty history. It is vastly disappointing. Millions of campaigners all over the world have been led to the top of the mountain, shown the view, and now we are being frogmarched down again'
Charles Abugre, Christian Aid

'We are very critical of what Bob Geldof did during the G8 Summit. The objectives of the whole Live 8 campaign had little to do with poverty reduction in Africa. It was a scheme to project Geldof and Blair as coming to the rescue of poor and helpless Africans'
Demba Moussa Dembele, African Forum on Alternatives

'A disaster for the world's poor'
The World Development Movement

Even The Guardian, some months after the Live8 concerts, revised its earlier sycophanticism:

"In fact, the murmurings of dissent among the charities associated with Make Poverty History started soon. The promised aid actually included the figures for debt relief, they said; in fact, only $12bn of new money, not $25bn, would be available in 2006. The World Bank was trying to water down the debt relief, imposing conditions on the recipient nations; Germany and Italy were letting it be known that "budgetary constraints" might prevent them from meeting the obligations that Blair had persuaded all the leaders to sign up to, in their own handwriting, at Gleneagles.

But the dissenters reserved their strongest words for Geldof. "He got too close to the government, and he got burned," is how John Coventry, of War on Want, puts it. "It seems that Geldof and Bono decided that they were bigger than the campaign and were pursuing their own strategy," the World Development Movement says in a statement. Live 8, the organisation claims, "displaced" the efforts of Make Poverty History "with a wall of celebrities, and no message beyond a vague notion about caring for the poor and wanting politicians to 'do something'. It obliterated everything else."

===>Three months ago Bob Geldof declared Live 8 had achieved its aim. But what really happened next? by Oliver Burkeman

Conspiracies as Fantasy's Reality Support

2006-03-26T16:59:00.000+01:00

At the Dissensus forum, poster Blunt writes:

"I'm wondering to what degree the prevalence of easy conspiracy theories is an inevitable result of how much of the West's experience of the world is mediated. Mediation creates for us the illusion of understanding 'how things work' on a macro-level, but the process of mediation (especially where mass media are concerned) typically - inherently? - involves the subject matter being wrapped up into a tight story, with beginning, middle and end, good guys and bad guys etc. This makes the message that much more palatable (and impactful) - but it generally doesn't have that much to do with the real world."

"A story is defined as much by what it excludes as what it includes, and real life tends to be rather more subtle than an episode of 24. It's usually the absence of these shades of grey that makes most conspiracy theories ring fairly hollow for me; it's their very consistency and narrowly-defined coherence that makes me doubt their veracity."

"I think Alasdair Spark summed up this idea best at the event I mentioned upthread. He concluded his part of the evening by saying: "I'm not sure I believe in 'truth' at all; which is not to say that I don't believe in reality." How often have I thought the same; but seldom expressed it so well ."

"Jake ... it's Chinatown"
The "perplexity" of the conspiracy "phenomenon", its symbiotic structure of belief, does have implications at the narrative (and postmodern) level. We can dismiss conspiracies as literal impossibilities but nonetheless an unresolved tension remains which suggests that simply rejecting them outright as obscurantist delirial raving is also reactionary.

And isn't what Blunt above defines as "mediation" yet another term for culture generally, actual social quotidian reality, itself a mere cultural construction, of the synbolic network of the Big Other? And if he believes that all of this is mere illusion [as he suggests above], a dream world, that serves to mask a real world behind it [quote: "but it generally doesn't have that much to do with the real world"], then doesn't HE TOO believe that the everyday social world we inhabit is a manufactured conspiracy serving to hide the really real (eg the world of power and capital) that lies behind it (analogous, for instance, to The Matrix narrative, among numerous other pomo conspiracy film narratives: the list, in fact, is endless)?

The problem here is that one cannot actually or simply separate fantasy from reality (to say, for example, that "this here is fake, but that there is real" etc): reality is dependent for its very consistency on fantasy, on phantasmatic support - if you "remove" the illusion, reality too collapses, and vice versa. In other words, "real" reality is structurally inaccessible in and of itself - the closer you get to it the more it distorts. This impossible-but-true phenomenon of the inaccessibility of reality, of course, has been well known in modern science since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and in psychoanalysis since Freud's and Lacan's theories, and, incidentally, in political economy since Marx's analysis of the unrepresentability, the abstract nature, of power and capital.

So the paradox of conspiracies [and debates about them] is that they establish an ontological conflict between, on the one hand, a reality in which the sources of power, capital, corruption, etc are revealed or exposed, and on the other hand, a reality in which a perceptual obsession with secretive cabals and subterranean forces behind the everyday experiences is evidence of paranoia, hysteria, insanity. Conspiracy stories and narratives endeavour to map the "unrepresentable negative sublimity of Capital" (Jameson), so invoking a tension between an analysis of the impersonal forces of power and capital, and an "explanation" of power that concentrates on the actions of a mysterious, specific group or cabal.

[And isn't Sparks' sentiment, which Blunt quotes above, the ultimate in postmodern disavowal of belief, viz "I know that there is no ultimate truth or reality, but nevertheless I privately believe that there is ..."?? ie. he too believes in the notion of an underlying conspiracy in spite of his "disavowing" of it.]

The rational difficulty that arises with the outright rejection of all conspiracies of whetever ilk - because they're too "simple" or too "ridiculous" or just downright paranoid and devoid of "common sense" (another ideological construction) - is that the very power relations that conspiracies hint at or point to are also rejected, the worlds of social relations are depoliticised, the real of social power is rejected outright: such a reactionary move is thus away from the collective-political and towards the personal-subjective - one seeks refuge in personal fantasies [eg the imaginary symbolic of New Ageism, etc], which then become the "real" while the "outside" world itself becomes a "fantasy", a dream, a crazy hallucination of meaningless phantasms, appearances and floating signifiers. The result of such a retreat into "solipsistic narcissism", into a limitless fantasy Ego, is the pathology of dissolving all analyses of actual power relations in the external world into mere "subjective neurosis", a reversal of the true state of affairs.

The world of power and capital, however abstract, is real. It is contemporary, postmodern culture, and the ideology underlying it, that seeks to "normalise" itself by disavowing this reality, so rendering this cultural phantasm itself as "natural" and "common sensical" and Real: we have to face facts, we have to recognise limits, we have to play the game, this is all there is, etc. Conspiracies about the power relations underlying that culture serve to challenge and undermine it, and so are therefore attributed to delusion.

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And at a time when a majority of, for instance, Americans, now believe that they were betrayed, manipulated, misled about the illegal invasion of Iraq, among other things, the Bush Admin having used the pretext of 9/11 and the resulting paranoid, permanent "war on terror", isn't it only inevitable that a growing number of Americans will seek out a "conspiracy theory" when their Hollywoodized fantasy world starts to collapse, the "real" of such a conspiracy serving to prop up [suturing or quilting] or regenerate such fantasies??

CNN POLE: Do you agree with Charlie Sheen that the U.S. government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks?

Yes = 82% 11,337 votes
No = 18% 2,501 votes
(Total: 13, 838 votes )

So.. Is it safe to come out yet? [via Qlipoth]

Charlie Sheen has at least one thing in common with George Bush: His father played the president on TV for a very long time. But Charlie Sheen is not afraid to question the official story of September 11th as endorsed by George Bush. Sheen's words - and four years of hard work by 9/11 skeptics - are making a difference. It is suddenly allowable to voice your suspicions about September 11th. The official mythology is losing its sway with the American people. Suddenly, a 911Truth.org spokesperson is invited to appear on CNN…

Martin Sheen's son, Charlie Sheen: "We're not the conspiracy theorists on this particular issue. It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75% of their targets, that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions."

"It feels like from the people I talk to in and around my circles, it seems like the worm is turning… It is up to us to reveal the truth. It is up to us because we owe it to the families, we owe it to the victims. We owe it to everybody's life who was drastically altered, horrifically that day and forever. We owe it to them to uncover what happened."

"There was a feeling, it just didn't look any commercial jetliner I've flown on any time in my life and then when the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother 'call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?"

Diversions and Inactivities

2006-03-23T23:38:00.000Z

Apologies to regular readers for the delay in transmission of late, having been over-distracted into posting activity at assorted forums and the comments sections on others' blogs [as well as some depressing protest activity during the past week: the anti-war demo last Saturday in Dublin attracted a pitiable 600 souls, versus 100,000 three years ago, further confirmation of the consequences for such movements of being hijacked by self-serving party politics, all this occuring as the slaughter escalates in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, and the US nuclear-strike threat goes critical].

Two lengthy posts are due: one an extended review of Zizek's The Pervert's Guide To Cinema [much more refreshing than his recent unreasonably provocative, lazy contribution in the New York Times, on Europe as the only significant Evental-Site of resistance to US global hegemony (and its Chinese version), perhaps the most ill-considered, ridiculously un-Zizekian article he has ever produced in his increasingly perverse, chameleon over-identification with his "target audience"]; the second, inspired by K-punk's recent outline of Telecommunism , and accompanied by Angela's post at S0metim3s on national-international distractions from the communist project, concentrating on the Theology of Kapitalism and on those strategies of accelerated alienation that may serve to progressively undermine it.

Delighting in Zizekian Perversity

2006-03-14T04:36:00.000Z

Having received its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in February, a one-hour version of Sophie Fiennes' two-hour documentary, The Pervert's Guide To Cinema, scripted and presented by Slavoj Zizek, will be broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 this Thursday at 23.05 as the fourth and final installment of ArtShock, the contemporary art series:

ArtShock , a four-part late-night arts series, follows some of the UK's most prolific artists as they investigate the more extreme angles and examples of modern art. Is cinema one big Freudian slip? What can the Marx Brothers tell us about the workings of the unconscious? And why exactly do The Birds attack in Hitchcock's masterpiece of horror? Addressing these questions and many more, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is acclaimed philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, vividly uncovering what the movies can tell us about ourselves. Prod/ Dir: Sophie Fiennes; Exec Prod: Martin Rosenbaum; Prod Co: Lone Star Productions.

From the Rotterdam Film Programme:

A unique journey through film history. Been now world-famous psychoanalyst and culture theoretician Slavoj Zizek takes us using famous film fragments to the deepest crypts of the human psyche.

Slavoj Zizek is a phenomenon. This popular and untiring Slovenian sociologist, philosopher and culture critic has a great influence on contemporary political and cultural debate with his publications and lectures on themes including fundamentalism, globalisation, human rights, cyberspace, post-modernism and multi-culturalism. Sophie Fiennes had the idea of putting Zizek into models designed by Remko Schnorr and Ben Zuydwijk of the sets of several famous feature films. With infectious enthusiasm, Zizek lets his - highly (post-)psychoanalytically influenced - ideas loose on films such as The Birds, The Conversation and The Great Dictator. It is no accident that Zizek often stumbles upon Hitchcock, probably the most Freudian of all film directors. For instance, he compares the three floors of the scary Norman Bates mansion (Psycho) with the Freudian concepts of Id, Ego and Superego. And he links the unforgettable scene in Blue Velvet where Kyle MacLachlan, hiding in the wardrobe, observes the violence and frustrated interaction between Isabella Rossellini and Denis Hopper, with the moment when an innocent child sees the sex act performed by his parents. Zizek presents his arguments so naturally, so convincingly and so rapidly that the viewer's head is left spinning. To what degree are film makers aware of the unconscious or subconscious components of their own creativity? And how much do these components contribute to the success of their films?

About The Film-Maker

A serious view on reality TV, Penelope Debelle, February 22, 2005

[Alternatively, How To Successfully Pitch A Documentary Idea]

Reality TV, and the low-browness the genre encompasses, may be the ugly cousin of the more revered documentary artform but it has surprising support among serious documentary makers.

Sophie Fiennes, a London-based filmmaker who worked as an assistant to the British film director Peter Greenaway before turning to documentary, says we should learn from it. In Adelaide this week [February] for the 2005 Australian International Documentary Conference, Fiennes, who is the sister of film stars Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, defended shows including Big Brother despite what she calls their "terrifying gladiatorial" base.

"It is actually very interesting because the key series of reality TV really do reflect society," she says. "People are very quick to demonise Big Brother or Wife Swap, but they don't knock the programs I think are really hideous - how to improve your house, how to improve your hairstyle, your this, your that, the endless bourgeois bettering."

While others hate them, including the anthropological documentary maker Dennis O'Rourke, whose Landmines - A Love Story, set in Kabul, premiered last night, Fiennes says that they are talked about so much shows their relevance to culture.

"As hideous as they are, they reflect a hideousness that is at work in social programming where we think we have choice to be ourselves but we are really being pocketed into being certain kinds of types," she says.

Fiennes is best known for her documentary Hoover Street Revival, a study of life around the Los Angeles church of the charismatic black preacher and brother of singer Grace Jones, the Reverend Noel Jones, whose vibrant and powerful sermons have been the salvation of the congregation in one of the toughest ghettos in Los Angeles.

"I was seeking actually to see what was the tension between what was said in church and what life itself dealt people who went to church," says Fiennes, still jet-lagged after a 25-hour flight from England. "I couldn't even follow individual stories. I was more interested in the impossibility of seeing what was happening in this community - it was more like, 'wham, bam, thank you ma'am' into disparate moments of people's lives rather than the usual documentary conceit where 'I have found my characters and I will follow their journey'."

Tomorrow she will be one of about 20 hopefuls selected to pitch their latest project to international and Australian programmers, financiers, co-production partners and buyers who have come to Adelaide looking for material. Her shamelessly titled The Pervert's Guide to Cinema will focus on the work of hip Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, author of Enjoy Your Symptom!. Instead of observing him, documentary style, Fiennes wants an essay to camera with Zizek talking about the psychological level on which cinema functions.

After that, she may take up an offer from Grace Jones to make a film of her life, or try directing a work of fiction. She is writing her first feature piece. Her brothers are not necessarily included, but could be. "If there was a part - you know, something they were well suited to play - then yeah, I am very close to them," she says.
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Zizek's Latest Mainstream Cut n' Paste Media Incursion:

Defenders of the Faith, Zizek, NYT editorial, March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor [via I Cite]

FOR centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?
...
This argument couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.
...
Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.
...

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.

Two years ago, Europeans were debating whether the preamble of the European Constitution should mention Christianity as a key component of the European legacy. As usual, a compromise was worked out, a reference in general terms to the "religious inheritance" of Europe. But where was modern Europe's most precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post.

Atheism is a European legacy worth fighting for, not least because it creates a safe public space for believers. Consider the debate that raged in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional controversy simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons, the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from other former Yugoslav republics.

Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad. And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest "understanding" for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe.

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The paradox is that Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them.

While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.

What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

UPDATE: Le Colonel Chabert's comment on Zizek's article - " ... this bit of smug, ostentatious White Supremacism ..."

To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the American civilization and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no, then the only alternative is Europe. The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream. In the present constellation, only Europe can do so. The true opposition today is not the one between the United States and the Third World, but the one between the whole of the American global Empire (and its Third World colonies) and Europe.

Oscar ... Can't Be With Us Tonight

2006-03-06T21:28:00.000Z

As US Fascism deepens and normalises...

Irish Oscar winning film's star tells of airport detention

The star of Ireland’s newest Oscar winning film today told about the heavy handed tactics of US immigration officials who refused him entry to America to attend the awards. Ruaidhri Conroy, who starred in action short Six Shooter, said he was barred from entering the States because he overstayed a visa by two days in 1998. During his day-long detention in Los Angeles airport, the award winning actor was offered only crisps, crackers and processed noodles to eat.

Conroy claimed he had never been made to feel so unwelcome.“I was escorted onto the plane by four officers and they said if you behave we won’t handcuff. They were very heavy,” he said. Directed by renowned playwright Martin McDonagh, dark comedy Six Shooter picked up the gong for Best Live Action Short Film. Conroy, who had a seat reserved at the 78th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood for the ceremony, revealed how he spent 22 hours in custody at Los Angeles’ LAX airport before being sent home. “I came up with my passport and my little immigration form and they just said they wanted to talk to me about my stay there in 1998 – I was over in New York doing a play written by Martin as well actually,” he told RTE Radio. “They said I had overstayed on a visa, and I didn’t think very much of it.”

US immigration officials questioned Conroy about his visits to America, his parents, and warned him he might not make it into the country.“They asked what age I was, all sorts of ridiculous questions,” he said. “And then took me into a cell, a bare cell, and put me up against the wall and searched me, went through my bag, took an inventory of all my valuables and took all my fingerprints again.” Conroy told the officers he had travelled to the States to attend the Oscars. “I said that from the beginning, but I don’t think that impressed them very much to be honest. I think that egged them on more to keep me out of the country rather than keep me in,” he said. “They weren’t very nice people to be honest, they weren’t very welcoming.” He went on: “I don’t think I’ve felt so unwelcome anywhere in my life and I think they just thought that I am a young man saying I am going to the Oscars that they may have got a certain satisfaction from preventing that happening."

“You were treated like a criminal basically.”

Conroy was best known for his role as Tito in Into the West [Directed by Jim Sheridan]. His latest film, Six Shooter, which also stars Brendan Gleeson, has already been shown twice on RTE television and is due to be aired on Channel 4 on Wednesday.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is of course nothing unusual here. Indeed, the 50,000 or so undocumented Irish, as with all other nationalities, in America now live in constant fear, in daily dread, unable to travel abroad, unable even to get a driver's licence, while Ted Kennedy & Co continue lobbying on their behalf, lobbying that is clearly doomed under the WASP/Neo-Con openly fascist Republican regime. Worse, aren't US legislators about to pass a law making it a felon to "be" an "illegal immigrant" - so criminalising all undocumented immigrants in the US - all 12 million of them, PLUS anyone else who might assist them (more millions of employers, landlords, charities, religious organisations, etc). All this occurring as the Bushists secretly construct "prison camps" for the future "benefit" of US Muslims ...

As low-wage immigrants constitute the core economic backbone of most wealthy Western economies, such a law (among others recent and planned) will further hasten the collapse of the US economy. And The Sooner the Better, For All ...

I boycotted the country 4 years ago. I would strongly recommend you do the same, at this point - and for rational, ethical Americans to systematically encourage same.

-------------------------------------------------------------
And ... you only have to look odd to be tossed out of Amerikay now - remember this?

Yusuf Islam Banned from U.S.
September 28, 2004

Last week, Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens) was on a plane bound for Washington, DC when it set down in Bangor, ME. The plane was boarded by FBI agents who removed Islam before sending him back to London. So far, U.S. officials have been very sketchy on there reasons for deporting Islam, but the composer of Peace Train has been marked as a potential threat to national security. Islam converted to Islam in 1977, leaving his music career behind (he has recently returned to recording and performing). After Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was published, Islam reportedly supported an Iranian fatwa against the author, although he now claims that he was misquoted and he has recently been campaigning for peace. Would seeing Cat Stevens sitting next to you on a plane make you nervous?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While the US banning, harassment, and attempted criminalisation of "suspect" foreigners, especially artists, has been continuing to escalate for a number of years - now Britain has decided to join in: Just Like In The Movies.

Chomsky's Turn

2006-03-06T03:41:00.000Z

Very, very different views expressed here from just six weeks ago:

World in peril, Chomsky tells overflow crowd

-----March 5th, 2006-----Press & Sun-Bulletin

There are dire consequences to the current direction of the U.S. foreign policy, said Noam Chomsky in a speech Saturday at Binghamton University. Among those consequences, he said, is a nuclear Armageddon.

"Under the current U.S. policies, a nuclear exchange is inevitable," the 77-year-old MIT professor said in his presentation, "Imminent Crises: Paths Toward Solutions." He spoke to an over-capacity crowd in BU's Osterhout Concert Theater. Chomsky cited nuclear proliferation and environmental collapse as the two greatest crises that "literally threaten survival."

The United States of Death Squads: Now in Iraq

2006-03-05T00:16:00.000Z

Death Mask: The Deliberate Disintegration of Iraq

[... an extended version of a column appearing in last December 2's edition of The Moscow Times.] [via Empire Burlesque]

The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: "Jeez, these bozos couldn't boil an egg without causing collateral damage."

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

Investigative journalist Max Fuller marshals a convincing case for this dread conclusion in a remarkable work of synthesis drawn from information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents. Piling fact on damning fact, he shows that the vast majority of atrocities now attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias are in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets, Global Research reports.

We first reported here in June 2003 that the U.S. was already hiring Saddam's security muscle for "special ops" against the nascent insurgency and re-opening his torture haven, Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, powerful Shiite militias – including Talibanic religious extremists armed and trained by Iran – were loosed upon the land. As direct "Coalition" rule gave way to various "interim" and "elected" Iraqi governments, these violent gangs were formally incorporated into the Iraqi Interior Ministry, where the supposedly inimical Sunni and Shiite units often share officers and divvy up territories.

Bush helpfully supplied these savage gangs – who are killing dozens of people each week, Knight-Ridder reports – with American advisers who made their "counter-insurgency" bones forming right-wing death squads in Colombia and El Salvador. Indeed, Bush insiders have openly bragged of "riding with the bad boys" and exercising the "Salvador option," lauding the Reagan-backed counter-insurgency program that slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, Newsweek reports. Bush has also provided a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" to coordinate the operation of his Iraqi "commandos," as the Pentagon's own news site, DefendAmerica, reports. The Iraqi people can go without electricity, fuel and medicine, but by God, Bush's "bad boys" will roll in clover as they carry out their murders and mutilations.

For months, stories from the Shiite south and Sunni center have reported the same phenomenon: people being summarily seized by large groups of armed men wearing police commando uniforms, packing high-priced Glocks, using sophisticated radios and driving Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The captives are taken off and never seen again – unless they turn up with a load of other corpses days or weeks later, bearing marks of the gruesome tortures they suffered before the ritual shot in the head. Needless to say, these mass murders under police aegis are rarely investigated by the police.

Earlier this year, one enterprising Knight-Ridder reporter, Yasser Salihee, actually found several eyewitnesses willing to testify to the involvement of the U.S.-backed commandos in 12 such murders. The offer was shrugged off by the Interior Ministry's spokesman – an American "adviser" and veteran bones-maker from the Colombian ops. In the end, it didn't matter; Salihee was shot dead by a U.S. sniper at a checkpoint a few days afterwards.

The Bushists may have been forced to ditch their idiotic fantasies of "cakewalking" into a compliant satrapy, but they have by no means abandoned their chief goals in the war: milking Iraq dry and planting a permanent military "footprint" on the nation's neck. If direct control through a plausible puppet is no longer possible, then fomenting bloody chaos and sectarian strife is the best way to weaken the state. The Bushists are happy to make common cause with thugs and zealots in order to prevent the establishment of a strong national government that might balk at the ongoing "privatizations" that have continued apace behind the smokescreen of violence, and the planned opening of Iraq's oil reserves to select foreign investors – a potential transfer of some $200 billion of Iraqi people's wealth into the hands of a few Bush cronies, the Independent reports.

The violence is already dividing the county into more rigid sectarian enclaves, the New York Times reports, as Shiites flee Sunni commandos and Sunnis flee Shiite militias in the grim tag-team of their joint endeavor. It's all grist for the Bushist mill: an atomized, terrorized, internally riven society is much easier to manipulate. And of course, a steady stream of bloodshed provides a justification for maintaining a substantial American military presence, even as politic plans for partial "withdrawal" are bandied about.

There's nothing new in this; Bush is simply following a well-thumbed playbook. For example, in 1953 the CIA bankrolled Islamic fundamentalists and secular goon squads to destabilize the democratic government of Iran – which selfishly wanted to control its own oil – and pave the way for the puppet Shah, as the agency's own histories recount. In 1971, CIA officials admitted carrying out more than 21,000 "extra-judicial killings" in its "Phoenix" counter-insurgency operation in Vietnam. (The true number of victims is certainly much higher.) In 1979, the CIA began sponsoring the most violent Islamic extremist groups in Afghanistan – supplying money, arms, even jihad primers for schoolchildren – to destabilize the secular, Soviet-allied government and provoke the Kremlin into a costly intervention, as Robert Dreyfus details in his new book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Later, Saudi magnate Osama bin Laden – whose family firm helped kick-start George W. Bush's business career – joined the operation, and his men were sent to America for "anti-Soviet" terrorist training, as Greg Palast reports. And of course, these examples only scratch the scorched-earth surface of America's double-dealings in this deathly shadow world.

This bi-partisan policy has been remarkably consistent for more than half a century: to augment the wealth and power of the elite, American leaders have supported – or created – vicious gangs of killers and cranks to foment unrest, eliminate opponents and terrorize whole nations into submission. The resulting carnage in the target countries – and inevitable blowback against ordinary Americans – means nothing to these Great Gamesters; it's merely the price of doing business. Bush's "incompetence" is just a mask for stone-cold calculation.
********************************************************

And via Qlipoth

Somebody is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq :

Robert Fisk: The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities ... We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad ... What is going on in Iraq at the moment is extremely mysterious. I go to Iraq and I can't crack this story at the moment. Some of my colleagues are still trying to, but can't do it. It's not as simple as it looks. I don't believe we've got all these raving lunatics wandering around blowing up mosques. There's much more to this than meets the eye. All of these death squads that move around are part of the security forces ... I go into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad and I see lots and lots of armed men wearing black leather. Who is paying these guys? Well, we are, of course. The money isn't falling out of the sky ... I mean, this is a barbarous world we're living in now in the Middle East. It's never been so dangerous here, either for journalists or soldiers but most of all for Arabs. Hence the thousands of people in the mortuary.

And

American Islarmism

December 08, 2005,

U.S. Helps Some Iran-Backed Terror -- Inter Press Service -- Dahr Jamail and Harb al-Mukhtar

BAGHDAD, Dec 8 (IPS) - After the U.S. forces and the bombings, Iraqis are coming to fear those bands of men in masks who seem to operate with the Iraqi police ... Omar Ahmed's family learnt what it can mean to run into the police, their supposed protectors ... "The Badr Army is conducting a campaign to destroy other political parties and their electoral advertisements," said Saleh Hassir, a doctor at a Baghdad medical centre. "We see black paint and tears on ex-prime minister Allawi's posters and those of the Sunni groups, but pictures of al-Hakim remain unaffected." The doctor says the Americans have helped bring in new Iran-backed terror. "So many of us are against Iraq being controlled by these fundamental Islamic Iranian loyalists like al-Hakim," the doctor told IPS. "Now we are seeing the suffering and ultimate dictatorship they have brought us here with the help of the Americans."

The Seasoned Pro's Opinion:

Warning of the outcome of a possible civil war in Iraq, Negroponte said sectarian civil war in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global war on terror. Note - he did not say it would be a "serious setback" to the Iraqi people, over 1,400 of whom have been slaughtered in sectarian violence touched off by the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week in Samarra. No, the violence and instability in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global "war on terror." But it's interesting for him to continue, "The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic," whilst feigning his concern. Because generating catastrophic consequences for civilian populations just happens to be his specialty. If we briefly review the political history of John Negroponte, we find a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human rights abuses, and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence ...

In the middle of Negroponte's tenure in Iraq, the Pentagon (read Donald Rumsfeld) openly considered using assassination and kidnapping teams there, led by the Special Forces.

Referred to not-so-subtly as "the Salvador option," the January 2005 rhetoric from the Pentagon publicized a proposal that would send Special Forces teams to "advise, support and possibly train" Iraqi "squads." Members of these squads would be hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga militia and Shia Badr militiamen used to target Sunni resistance fighters and their sympathizers.

What better man to make this happen than John Negroponte? His experience made him the perfect guy for the job. What a nice coincidence that he just happened to be in Baghdad when the Pentagon/Rumsfeld were discussing "the Salvador option."

Fast forward to present day Iraq, which is a situation described by the Washington Post in this way: "Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound."

The Independent newspaper from London recently reports that hundreds of Iraqis each month are tortured to death or executed by death squads working out of the Shia-run Ministry of Interior.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

... As the Black-ops spread to Iran:

Bomb blast hits Iranian oil city

- The attack is the latest in a series to hit the restive Khuzestan Province, at the heart of Iran's oil industry.

Masculinist Western Distractions

2006-02-27T23:23:00.000Z

Westerns and Narrative Continuity

[As an aside, and in response to queries re the Death Drive and its absense in Lynch's Mulholland Drive as reviewed : the only appearance in the film is during the space between the two Blue Boxes, between Club Silencio and Rita's opening of the little Blue Box, this short gap being the movie's short-lived disciplined space between the Two Deaths: between the death of Diane/Betty's Real (her fantasmatic support of reality) and her Symbolic (her subsequent disconnection from quotidian reality). Alas, Lynch has yet to seriously confront this Space in any of his films ...].

Give Iranian Nukes A Chance

2006-02-25T00:10:00.000Z

No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.====>Daybreak, Frederich Nietzsche

Give Iranian Nukes a Chance

In a mad world, the logic of MAD still works
===================================>Slavoj Zizek

On August 2, France, Britain and Germany announced that they might cut off negotiations with Iran and pursue punitive sanctions if the country followed through on its threats to resume its uranium enrichment program. The announcement came a day after the Washington Post reported that American intelligence agencies believe the country is a decade away from producing a nuclear weapon-an assessment that differs with earlier timetables cited by Bush administration officials, who estimated that Iran was only five years away from such a weapon. Responding to the Post story, State Department spokesman Tom Casey dismissed the divergent timetables, noting that both the United States and Europe have concluded that Iran’s nuclear ambitions pose “a threat for the entire international community.”

But are nuclear arms in the hands of Iran’s rulers really a threat to international peace and security? To answer the question properly, one has to locate it in its political and ideological context.

Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature of this link between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure’s permanent state of emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to today’s “war on terror.” The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike. Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and human rights (e.g., the London police’s recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes).

Classic power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a threatening gesture. Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat. With the “war on terror”, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization, not of the threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral premises of today’s “war on terror” [see quote above].

Is not the ongoing “war on terror” proof that “terror” is the antagonistic Other of democracy-the point at which democracy’s plural options turn into a singular antagonism? Or, as we so often hear, “In the face of the terrorist threat, we must all come together and forget our petty differences.” More pointedly, the difference between the “war on terror” with previous 20th century worldwide struggles such as the Cold War is that the enemy used to be clearly identified with the actually existing Communist empire, whereas today the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the description of Linda Fiorentino’s character in The Last Seduction: “Most people have a dark side … she had nothing else.” Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side … the terrorist threat has nothing else. The paradoxical result of this spectralization of the enemy is an unexpected reflexive reversal. In this world without a clearly identified enemy, it is the United States, the protector against the threat, that is emerging as the main enemy-much like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient-Express, where, since the entire group of suspects is the murderer, the victim himself (an evil millionaire) turns out to be the real criminal.

This background allows us to finally answer our initial question: Yes, nukes for Iran-and Noriega and Saddam to the Hague. It is crucial to see the link between these two demands. Why are Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and other internationalist liberals-who are otherwise full of pathetic praise for the Hague tribunal-silent about the idea to deliver Noriega and Saddam to the Hague? Why Milosevic and not Noriega? Why was there not even a public trial against Noriega? Was it because he would have disclosed his own CIA past, including how the United States condoned his participation in the murder of Omar Torrijos Herrera? In a similar way, Saddam’s regime was an abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when the U.S. representatives were enumerating Saddam’s evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was undoubtedly his greatest crime (in terms of human suffering and of violating international law): the aggression against Iran. Why? Because the United States and the majority of foreign states actively helped Iraq in this aggression. What’s more, the United States now plans to continue Saddam’s work of toppling the Iranian government.

The Underside of The American Dream:

"They Did it! They finally had a nuclear war! And nobody survived....except me!"

As to Iran and nukes, the surprising fact is that the MAD logic still operates today: Why hasn’t the tension between India and Pakistan exploded into an all-out war? Because both sides are nuclear powers. Why have the Arab states not risked another attack on Israel? Because Israel is a nuclear power. So why should this MAD logic not work in the case of Iran? The standard counter-argument is that in Iran, Muslim fundamentalists are in power who may be tempted to nuke Israel. (Iran is the only large Arab state which not only does not diplomatically recognize Israel, but resolutely denies its right to exist as a state). Is, however, the Iranian regime really so “irrational”? Isn’t Pakistan, with its nuclear arms and its secret services’ ties to al-Qaeda, a much greater threat? Furthermore, two decades ago, Iran was brutally attacked by Iraq (with active U.S. support), so it has every right to feel threatened.

The last trump card of Western liberals is that nuclear weapons would help sustain the anti-democratic rulers in Iran, thus preventing a democratic revolution there. This argument got a boost a few months ago, with elections in Iraq and Palestine. Was perhaps Paul Wolfowitz correct after all? Isn’t there a chance that (Western) democracy may work and take roots in the Middle East, and that this unexpected process will change the coordinates of the entire Middle East? Isn’t the ultimate unresolvability of the Middle East conflict the fact that the anti-democratic Arab regimes need Israel as the figure of the Enemy that legitimizes their rule? Consequently, isn’t Bush merely accomplishing the work of Reagan? In the same way that Reagan was “naively” convinced that democracy would undermine Communism and that Communism would fall, thus proving all the skeptic specialists wrong, perhaps Bush will be proven right in his “naive” crusade for the democratization of the Middle East.

It is here that one approaches the crux of the matter: Such an optimistic reading relies on the problematic belief in a preestablished harmony between the global spread of multi-party Western democracy and the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. It is precisely because this harmony can in no way be taken for granted that countries like Iran should possess nuclear arms to constrain the global hegemony of the United States.

Experience Without A Code

2006-02-24T23:15:00.000Z

Corpses in the Garden: Knowing what I know about the history of my country, it is often difficult for me to fathom how my fellow countrymen have shaped their views. I have come to believe that they have created a mythical America that is not a real place. The perceived necessity of substituting a fantasy world for the real world suggests there is something terribly wrong with the American psyche===>Charles Sullivan

But Charles, it never was "the real world," and that which is "terribly wrong with the American psyche" is the long-held belief in this fundamentalist fantasy.

"Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all ..."===>Ralph Waldo Emerson

The American individualist, puritanical tradition - of the search for authenticity, for an experience without a code (Barthes), to - in the words of Percy Miller - "confront face to face, the physical universe ... without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony," and, he might have added, language - is alive and well ...

Still, let the corpses in our gardens rise. They are trying to tell us something that may make our survival possible.

Plagues and Miscellaneous Idiocy

2006-02-21T13:31:00.000Z

The people "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise."====>The Plague: an account from Boccaccio's The Decameron

In the 14th Century

In the early 1330s an outbreak of deadly bubonic plague [Black Death] occurred in China, spreading via trade routes to Europe. The bubonic plague mainly affects rodents, but fleas can transmit the disease to people. Once people are infected, they infect others very rapidly.

Eyewitness: "Realizing what a deadly disaster had come to them, the people quickly drove the Italians from their city. But the disease remained, and soon death was everywhere. Fathers abandoned their sick sons. Lawyers refused to come and make out wills for the dying. Friars and nuns were left to care for the sick, and monasteries and convents were soon deserted, as they were stricken, too. Bodies were left in empty houses, and there was no one to give them a Christian burial."

By the following August, the plague had spread as far north as England, where people called it "The Black Death" because of the black spots it produced on the skin. A terrible killer was loose across Europe, and Medieval medicine had nothing to combat it.

In winter the disease seemed to disappear, but only because fleas--which were now helping to carry it from person to person--are dormant then. Each spring, the plague attacked again, killing new victims. After five years 25 million people were dead--one-third of Europe's people, the population falling from 75m in 1347 to 50m 1342.

Even when the worst was over, smaller outbreaks continued, not just for years, but for centuries. The survivors lived in constant fear of the plague's return, and the disease did not disappear until the 1600s.

Medieval society never recovered from the results of the plague. So many people had died that there were serious labor shortages all over Europe. This led workers to demand higher wages, but landlords refused those demands. By the end of the 1300s peasant revolts broke out in England, France, Belgium and Italy.

The disease took its toll on the church as well. People throughout Christendom had prayed devoutly for deliverance from the plague. Why hadn't those prayers been answered? A new period of political turmoil and philosophical questioning lay ahead.

In the 21st Century

Avian Flu

[Also Elsewhere: Plague Island - 'In Great Britain, racism is smouldering like the funeral pyres in the areas of foot and mouth.'
---------------------------

Kapital's Patriarchal Plague [from Eyes Wide Shut]

Kapital's Nationalist Plague

================The Eagle Has Landed==================

Western Racism, Artists, and Plague Paranoia:
Dissensus non-debate: Just Like In The Moovees

The Horror of Fantasy's Death [Perturbing the MacGuffins]

2006-02-18T02:25:00.000Z

[Kapital's Desire Algorithm: It may be only a fantasy, but its our fantasy, and its the only damn fantasy we've got - so why don't you Get With The Programme and come on in for the Big Win ...]

For some unimaginable though fortuitous reason it has come to pass that those film narratives which perturb the ever-present phantom that is the MacGuffin are always the most promising, a cinema that collapses the fantasmatic support for quotidian reality, with often alarming if not unusually uncanny results. Films by David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr.) , Stanley Kubrick (from The Killing up to The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierre Madre, The Dead), Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, North By Northwest), among many others (Cronenberg, Welles, Kieslowski, Polanski, Herzog, Wong Kar Wai, Roeg, Leconte, Godard, etc), to differing degrees and with varying effects, successfully occupy this cinematic vortex of shifting parallaxes. Enough, for the most part, to concentrate on Lynch's Mulholland Dr here, perhaps one of the more successful and challenging examples of such a film in the last decade.

Pure MacGuffins: Film narratives that leave the MacGuffin "magically" unresolved, breathlessly unexamined, that perpetuate the fantasy, are, of course, instances of sutured, seamless ideology at its purest: the precious "letters of transit" in Curtiz's Casablanca, the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction, much like the way, following Zizek, that the Coke brand functions "as the direct embodiment of "IT," of the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise." And it is this very superfluous character "between the sublime and the trash" that makes our desire for X all the more insatiable: "So, when, some years ago, the publicity motto for Coke was "Coke, that's IT!" we should discern in it the entire ambiguity: "that's it" precisely insofar as that's NEVER effectively IT, precisely insofar as every satisfaction opens up a gap of "I want MORE!"

Towards Perturbances: here the fantasy is interrupted, dislocated, the characters are thrown into anxious confusion and de-sutured lack, leading to either (1) a failed dejection and withdrawal/melancholy (A disoriented Clay at the end of Kubrick's The Killing, witnessing in disbelief as his $2m proceeds from the race-track heist scatters to the winds; lost object of desire: Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo after his "first" Madeline falls to her death); or (2) a hysterical, giddy, nihilistic laughter - "fail again, fail better" (Walter Huston, at the end of his son John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierre Madre, upon learning that all of his precious sacks of gold, mistaken for sand by bandits, were emptied into the desert sands); or (3) a disavowing, self-denying resolve to start all over again: displacement (Sidney Greenstreet, at the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon, upon discovering that the "precious" bird was a fake, then sets off on yet another quest, while - in typical patriarchal film noir fashion - the other, femme fatale "bird" takes The Fall; Cary Grant in North by Northwest, who, after ascertaining that Kaplan, his mistaken identity, does not and never did exist, transfers/displaces all of his attention onto his object of desire/petit a, Eva Marie Saint). In all of these examples, however, the mysterious, phantasmatic X remains undeconstructed, hovering somewhere off-space, awaiting a reappearance (as subsequently occurs in the second half of Vertigo, Madeline Mark II).

The All-consuming Parallactic Perturbance: "There's no going back now" - Perversity, Psychosis, Death Drive

Three films from the past decade brilliantly portray and confront the horror of fantasy-death, the evental perturbance, and its alternate but indeterminate consequences: Lost Highway (1998), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and Mulholland Dr (2001) - though Cronenberg's recent The History of Violence is also admirable, if ultimately unsatisfactory compared to this unprecedented trilogy - the last of which, Mulholland Dr is considered here.

Like Lynch's earlier film, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr involves characters who have two identities, identities who have two characters, and a host of elements that disrupt, rupture, or problematise the narrative's continuity. The two basic narratives (Betty's and Adam's) intersect in multiple ways that demand a reconstruction of time sequence. The two narratives are in fact the lines of "reality" and "the Real," fantastically excluded as the surplus of the scheme in order to produce a retro-Hollywood film starring the protegé of the corrupt Castigliane brothers, "Camilla Rhodes." More than any other Lynch film, Mulholland Dr requires the concept of suture, the stitching together or quilting of an exterior and interior at a point located precisely in the middle of the symbolic authoritarian Other.

The film's narrative opens with a limousine driving down Mulholland Dr at night, with a driver and assistant in the front seat and a brunette wearing evening clothes (Laura Elena Harring) in the back. The car makes an unscheduled stop, the driver turns around with a gun asking the passenger to get out of the car, but before the assassination can take place, a speeding car plows into the limo, killing the driver and assistant. The passenger staggers down the hillside and finds refuge in the vacated apartment of "Aunt Ruth," whose niece Betty (Naomi Watts) controls the "fantasy narrative," beginning with her arrival in Los Angeles, an ingenue seeking stardom in DreamWorld.

Key details occur before the accident scene: collaged images of couples jitterbugging and a bed with pink-red sheets, accompanied by the sighs of a woman. The street sign, "Mulholland Dr" [a psychoanalytic pun on Dr Mulholland?] takes us to the first narrative sequence.

Adam Kesher is a director of an upcoming retro film musical presently auditioning for the lead female role. In a meeting with the evidently corrupt Castiglione brothers (the name is spelled with two n's in the one of the credits), he is given an ultimatum ("This is the girl") to cast "Camilla Rhodes," a blond whose photo we see. Refusing, Kesher bashes the Castiglione brother's limo and drives to his modern house perched above Mulholland Dr. There he discovers his wife in bed with the pool serviceman, covers her jewelry with pink house paint, and is beaten up by the burly serviceman. Later Adam finds out that he has been frozen out of the production and, after a conversation with the enigmatic "cowboy" at a corral at night, gives in to the demands to hire the blond Camilla during the auditions the next day. Adam is the barred subject on account of his initial refusal and subsequent acquiescence.

This narrative, however, generates a fantasy that is not Adam's but one generated by the phallic desiring-to-desire Betty, who appears at the LA airport in the company of an old couple [Diane/Betty's grandparents in the script of the TV pilot from which the film was adapted, who apparently abused her as a child] who give her an informal welcome to the town and drive off in their own limousine, laughing. Betty's fantasy begins when she finds Rita, a mysterious brunette in the shower of her aunt's apartment. The woman tells her of the accident and says that she cannot remember her real name. Together they pursue the question of identity, ending in the discovery of a corpse in the apartment of "Diane Selwyn," lying on a bed with pink-red sheets.

Diane and Camilla are lovers, but Camilla breaks off the relationship. Diane is invited to an engagement party at Adam's house and driven to the same spot on Mulholland Dr, which now is revealed as a short-cut to Adam's house. Adam has by this time divorced his unfaithful wife and cast Camilla in the lead role. The original blond version of Camilla appears at the party as, we think, one of Camilla's new lovers. Betty, driven psychotic by jealousy, hires a hit man whom we have seen earlier.

Some scenes work as explicit sutures, in a recursive film narrative that is otherwise seemingly thoroughly de-sutured. Behind a "Twinkie's" fast-food restaurant is a wall concealing a dark-faced Mystery Tramp in the lane behind, who, in one scene, fulfills a nightmare of a "patient" who returns with his colleague/doctor to the scene of his traumatic, recurring dream. The patient dies of fright seeing the Mystery Tramp spring out from behind the wall. Later, we encounter the Mystery Tramp again in possession of the blue box, out of which run miniaturized versions of the couple [Betty/Diane's grandparents again] who accompanied Betty at the LA airport.

Objects also serve as suture devices. The hired killer tells Diane that he will send a blue key to her when he has succeeded in murdering Camilla. This key is on the coffee table in Diane's apartment when we find her alone, just before her suicide. The triangular blue key that opens the blue box is in Rita's purse at the beginning of Betty's narrative, and is the object that closes/twists the Rita/Betty narrative into the Camilla/Diane one. Lamps, phones, and Diane's bed also work as suture devices.

The Big Other of Mulholland Dr

Agents of Kapital

Mulholland Dr's Mulholland Drive is the "place" of the Big Other, the "network of symbolic relations" that establish the "reality" of the film. The fleet vehicle for this authoritarian system is the limousine, and all manipulative characters are connected with limousines. Above Mulholland Dr is Adam's modernist glass house, the scene of his confrontation with his adulterous wife and, later, his engagement party. The zone below contains Aunt Ruth's apartment, Club Silencio, and Diane's apartment, but the real zone are the purses and boxes that contain the "poché space" that provides the suture between Diane's fantasy (the "Real") and the reality of the director's dilemma and Diane's failed love affair with Camilla (the "Symbolic").

Each retreat by Adam (forced by the Castiglione brothers to accept their actress protegée) leads to another forced escape, bringing him back into the realm of symbolic relationships and the reality principle as he acquiesces to the Castiglione brothers' demand ("This is the girl") and even falls in love with Camilla Rhodes, albeit the brunette not the blond version.

Perturbance at Club Silencio

The Hell of the Real is Blue: Blue, Blue, Blue

Notice to the right hand side of the screen when Betty and Rita are outside at "2 in the morning" trying to get a taxi to the Club Silencio, there is a pole or street light with a sign that says "HELL".

During their late-night visit [this scene is preceded by an explicit homage to Ingmar Bergman's famous shot from Persona] to the Club Silencio nightclub (another, larger Blue Box - aside: the French expression for nightclub is "Boite de Nuit" - Box of night), Betty and Rita listen to Rebekah del Rio lip-sync a song, Llorando - Roy Orbison's Crying - [The female singer is introduced as "La Llorona de Los Angeles": "La Llorona" (The Crying Lady) is a traditional Ghost of Mexico City, foreshadowing Diane] and collapse. Betty immediately discovers a blue box in her handbag that seems to be made of the same material as a blue key found in Rita's purse earlier. Now determined, disciplined, resolute, they rush back to the apartment. But Betty disappears mysteriously, and after Rita opens the box she too disappears, along with the entire narrative apparatus and scenery. Betty now appears in the guise of Diane Selwyn, in a scene in her apartment, woken first by Big Other agent, The Cowboy. Rita appears, but not in clear temporal sequence and under her real name of "Camilla Rhodes."

"Del Rio has a tear painted on her right cheek as part of her make-up, indication that she is aware of the illusion - this is all fake. Yet she pours herself into her performance completely."

"Rebekah Del Rio's performance is an indication that, according to Diane, there is a large game, a large reality, and she is merely a pawn in it. Like an actor she can mouth the words - she might be able to perform them brilliantly, in fact - but they've already been written by someone else, and if she drops out, the larger story will continue."

As K-punk brilliantly argues in This Is (Not) The Girl, The Real of Mulholland Dr is not Diane’s supposedly waking world, but the paradoxically entrancing insomniac realm of Club Silencio (which, in acting as the gateway from the first section of the film to the second is like the ‘cut’ of the moebian band that when sutured together, transforms the two sides of the piece of paper into a single strip). I say ‘paradoxically entrancing’ because the scene is ostensibly demystifying. Yet only ostensibly so; like Magritte’s ‘This Is Not a Pipe’, Club Silencio, reminiscent of the Black/White Lodge in the first and final episodes of Twin Peaks and as intensely charged as anything in Lynch’s oeuvre, demonstrates film – and art’s - irreducible sorcery. Club Silencio’s scenario is thoroughly Potteresque. The entertainment is provided by perfomers who mime onstage to a pre-recorded soundtrack, much in the way that Potter had the characters in The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven lip sync to thirties’ pop.

Despite the complete ingenuousness of the magician-compere’s words – ‘There is no band. What you will hear are recordings.’- we (the audience) are nevertheless unable to resist the seduction of the spectacle. So when the apparent singer, Rebekah Del Rio, collapses but the music continues, we are shocked. Something in us compels us to treat the performance as if real.

This is the moment of the death of Betty/Diane's fantasmatic support of her reality, the withering away of her objet petit a, Rita/Camilla and her world of Desire, the terminal perturbance of the MacGuffin - her emergence as the machine in the ghost (the dejected Diane).

It would be difficult to conceive of a more compelling parable for postmodernism. Just as Postmodernism simultaneously exposes and disturbs generic conventions whilst also participating in their ‘lure’, so the Silencio audience is made aware of the artificiality of what they are experiencing at the very moment that they succumb to it. (See here for an analysis of this in relation to Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective.

There is of course nothing less mendacious, less dissimmulatory, in cinema’s history of illusion than the scene in Club Silencio. What we are seeing and hearing – the film itself - is a recording and nothing but. On the most banal level, this is the Real which the ‘magic of cinema’ must conceal. Yet the scene haunts for reasons other than this. It challenges the audience (us!) to recognize that our own lives, the roles we perform when we leave the auditorium, are themselves recordings, scripted by forces outside the self whose ‘substance’ turns out to be itself nothing more than a palimpsest of influences.

Rebekah del Rio

Lip syncing is a model for a subjectivity that is essentially empty; that is driven, not driving; that is a rendition, not an origination; whose inside, like that of the moebius band, is all outside. Watching Club Silencio I’m reminded of Philip K Dick’s gnomic but suggestive remark that ‘life is not lived, but lived through.’

Unlike Adam and Camilla, who submit totally to the perversion ("This is the girl"), life as entirely a symbolic recording and a submission to the Big Other (and so succeed in the world of Kapital), Diane refuses, she both aggressively rejects the Symbolic and is rejected by it ("Maybe someone is missing," "The girl is missing"), which, when combined with the collapse of her fantasy world, she succumbs to psychosis.

In the story we are first led to believe that Rita, the amnesiac accident victim of an attempted assassination, finds Betty, a "phallic girl" who helps her seek her true identity. This structure uses the anamorphy of character, role, and appearance to establish a mystery-within-a-mystery. The blue key and box are also the suture to reconnect this fantasy with the director's "reality".

The Horror of The Other's Desire: A Triptich

"Millions of years of evolution, right? Right? Men have to stick it in every place, but for women ... women it is just about security and commitment and whatever the fuck ... else! ... If ...You ... Men ... Only ... Knew ..."

Alice in Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut: Alice

"And I thought if he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything. You, Helena, my whole fucking future. Everything."

Lost Highway

"You'll never have me."

Mulholland Dr: Camilla

"Diane, we have to stop this."
It's Him, Isn't IT!

Deadlocks of Desire: A Riot of Phantasmatic Doublings and Displacements

Madeline, Madeline, Madeline [Vertigo]

Dead in the Real, Dead in the Symbolic, Stone-Cold Dead as a Corpse

Psychogenic Fugue

Grimace of the Real: The Thing, the Monster from the Lane

Psychosis/symbolic death: If you come too close to the sun, you get burnt.

A Ghost, about to be burnt, awaiting the arrival of the real Real.

Rita/Camilla-Diane/Betty are the parallactic Jekyll-Hyde formations that sets the whole film in motion and plant the principal discontinuities that provide for our interest and curiosity. The jitterbug dance is the key anamorphic element, the grimace or stain of the Real. It's even filmed as such, with ghostly images of the elderly couple/grandparents and a blond Camilla (wearing a wig) in the "foreground" with Betty. If we take the standard, cod-Cartesian "reality principle" reading, Betty's narrative is a dream-fantasy at or just before Diane's suicide. Her depression collapses parts of the narrative and also is linked, through the cowboy, to the director's story.

Naked and Exposed: Diane/Camilla always-already dead. No more fantasies, no more symbols, only the Horror ... - Rita! Rita! ... Camilla! Camilla,! ... Oh Come! Oh Monster from the Bottom of the Lane ... Oh Come! In and up from under the door, and up into and out from within me ... kill me.

There NEVER was a woman like Rita.

“The blank space of the Thing in itself is therefore something extremely dangerous to approach- if one gets too close to it, ‘world’ itself loses its ontological consistency, like the anamorphotic stain on Holbein’s Ambassadors,: when we shift our perspective and perceive it ‘as it is’ (as a skull), all remaining reality loses its consistency ...”

Interlacing: Medieval -Net Rhizome?

2006-02-17T00:10:00.000Z

In this detail from the Book of Kells, showing the heads of lions and chalices spouting vines, we can more clearly see the zoomorphic aspects of the interlace.

"However, in interlacing, the interweaving of the bodies of snakes and lions, of peacock and fishes, chalices and vines, is not intended to be a naturalistic representation of the existing world. These images are schematic and symbolic. The elements of the work are chosen from a repertoire of marks and usable images and themes; a set collection of pre-agreed upon symbols, forms, and images. The images are meant to represent some aspect of Christ's life: the snake representing rebirth (in the shedding of its skin) and, at the same time, Original Sin; the peacock representing the incorruptibility of Christ (a reflection of the ancient belief that the flesh of a peacock is incorruptible ..."

As Observing the Observer observes-via-quotation in Words that sound better in…Provençal: Entrebescant : "’entrebescant’: interlacing, intertwining. Related to the narrative strategy of interweaving ..."

Monastic "bee-hive huts" in Ballinskelligs, Ireland, location of the earliest monastic settlement, circa 6th-9th century.

Ballinskelligs (Skellig Michael) Rock, off the coast of Kerry, Ireland.

The Philosopher's film [narrative]: scene from Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass, from 1976, shot at Ballinskelligs ...

Hauntology in the Hyperreal: Digital Relics in Hypertext.

2006-02-15T01:49:00.000Z

"There is no band." ===>[Mulholland Dr.]

===== All ... is a recording =====

"There is no longer a double, one is already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, without a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it - simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority - we will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror,’ that was still the golden age of transcendence.”

The hyperreal has now almost-completely colonised and superceded the real. [See Baudrillard ]

The notion of the derelict and the disused comes up. Julian raised the idea - via Gibson (in one of the later novels) - of disused cyberspace: the websites of companies that have ceased to trade, digital relics awaiting re-population.

Hypertext [the principal characteristic of the World Wide Web], has, since its very inception in 1991, been always-already hyperreal, a copy without referent, despite the post-modern imperative of insisting that - even in hypertext - there is still somehow an unambiguous underlying reality that can somehow be referenced or alluded to. Nowhere is this clearer than in the phenomenon of the very first hypertext (below), which now transpires to be itself an online copy of a copy - of a website that doesn't anymore even exist in the nostalgic "real" of hyperspace. In contrast to "real" hypertexts, are the "machine in the ghost" websites, the digital relics referred to above, dormant copy hypertexts

[like this one, the oldest dormant hypertext in Ireland, from 1994, which, uncannily, coincided with the date of birth of Ireland's "Celtic Tiger" post-modern frenetic capitalism, to which the political shenannegans described in the hypertext allude],

the undead of the web, hyperreality at rest.

The first website hypertext, created by Hypertext/WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee in August 1991 at CERN in Switzerland, no longer exists, "only" surviving instead as an exact copy of a relic

[ the original URL address - now defunct - was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, confirming once again that hypertext persists, while its territorial location, its physical infrastructure (the Internet), perishes, fades away],

much as, in the establishment art canon, perfect painterly reproductions of the Masters are, without irony, called "genuine fakes."

Extract

World Wide Web

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access
to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions .

[1991] Files available on the net, posted on alt.hypertext (6, 16, 19th Aug)

[1985] Earliest Internet Domain Names [the first was SYMBOLICS.COM, registered on 15th March, 1985]

"I built on the work of others -- the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies togethe ... So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog."

Amazingly, web-creator Tim Berners-Lee, quoted from his blog above, has only recently (last December) set up his own blog: timbl's blog.