Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

Of all of the twentieth century’s world-historical figures, Comrade Stalin is, in my opinion, the greatest of them all. Obviously this seems somewhat ironic, given the fact that he did some terrible deeds such as purging the Party in the late 1930s and of course the infamous Doctor’s Plot, but I think it is indeed quite serious. It was no small feat leading a backwards peasant country to victory against the Nazi war machine, not to mention his implementation of democracy in the Soviet Union in 1937.

Here you can see him consecrating the long-awaited sexual act. I just wish these kinds of things weren’t so constantly overlooked as they are in today’s so-called post-industrial risk society. Maybe if we awoke from our collective dogmatic slumber, there wouldn’t be so many terrible problems in the world.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

A Fourth of July Question

Why do “liberals” always feel compelled to define “patriotism” such that they can claim themselves to be “patriotic”? What good comes from this, aside from openly acknowledging wing-nuts and other idiots who accuse those on the Left of being secret Muslims and whatnot? I openly profess to not being patriotic and mostly ambivalent towards America. The only country that strikes me as remotely pleasing is Sweden, and that’s really just a Dr. Jacoby-esque fantasy.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 6 Comments

Splendor in the Darkness: Von Trier as a Sadist

I just finished watching Lars von Trier’s third film, Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve and Peter Stormare. It’s about a Czech woman who comes to America in the hopes of raising enough money to have her son’s vision repaired before he, like her, eventually goes blind, but things don’t go quite as planned. After having seen only Dogville out of von Trier’s oeuvre, I have to say he might possibly be one of my favorite directors, if solely for the fact that he manages to provoke within the viewer a true sense of horror. His directing is similar to the Sadean boudoir, and his torturous probing goes to the very end, to the point where you almost can’t bear it. At the same time, von Trier’s heroines, like Sade’s victims, radiate with splendor, to borrow a phrase from Lacan in his analysis of Sophicles’ Antigone, under the most excruciating of circumstances.

In this way I think von Trier’s films are able to touch the core of tragedy, while abandoning any pretension or orthodoxies that he may or may not be accused of. Even if his visions don’t always succeed to their fullest potential, he cannot be accused of not being radical in the experimental sense. It’s through this that his films retain a thoroughly auteur quality that most contemporary cinema lacks (some exceptions off the top of my head would be Lynch, Kieslowski and Herzog).

The musical numbers in Dancer clearly contain a self-deprecating dimension that could be called Brechtian, but I think, more importantly, they serve as a reminder as to what the essence of film is by rendering palpable the fantasms that haunt reality, akin in many respects to the stifling libidinal space of the Lynchian mise-en-scène.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this movie. But it was torture to watch.

Oh, and if you’re curious about von Trier, check out the dogme!

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Obama Publishes His Version of Events…

The Obama campaign came out with a rumor debunking website today to combat the catcalls from the right and the leftover Clinton supporters (known to Ancient Romans as ‘the Gauls’).

The front page lists lies:

… and a helpful rebuttal:

Thing is, it doesn’t bother to argue or refute each point unless you click the little “Continue Reading” links, and even then you get things like this, which don’t really offer any facts in defense against the accusation. Maybe this kind of response is understandable as the accusations are hard to prove wrong, for example, disproving someone said something at some unspecific time, but if you’re just going to respond to “Michelle Obama said whitey” with “Michelle Obama didn’t say whitey,” why bother in the first place?

—Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment

The Odd Couple

This is lazy journalism. After months of hearing the same comparison used for Romney and Mccain, Clinton and Obama, News Hampshire and Iowa, and anybody with McCain, do we really need it for Obama and McCain?

I swear, if I get a LexisNexis account…

The movie came out in 1968, so anyone under 40 is going to miss the main reference, although they’ll probably get it from cultural context. It gets used when two people are put together who are (surprise) different in some way. It can apply to any situation involving two people who are not the same person. Lazy.

—Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment

Hugo Chávez: Stalinist Totalitarian Part III

In another article on Hugo Chávez’s ongoing totalitarian attempts at unleashing a socialist-stranglehold on the people of Venezuela, the New York Times has this to say:

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

Aside from not providing many details on what constitutes the essence of these reforms, which the Times can hardly be faulted for since the drafting and passage of the law ominously took place behind closed doors, there is even less information on why, exactly, this law would prompt people to inform on one another.

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

As far as I can tell, “complying with requests” has hardly anything to do with prompting people to spy on one another as one might be legally compelled to answer questions asked by, say, either the FBI or CIA here in the United States. The problem with the analysis is that the laws that prompted mass-domestic-spying asked for their neighbors to spy on one another, to keep tabs on suspicious activity, whereas this law seems instead to make it a legal requirement to comply with an agency’s investigation.

But, to risk borrowing a kettle and returning it in less than proper fashion, I would not necessarily reject the notion of domestic spying. The problem is that, historically speaking, it has been carried out horribly in the past. An especially clear example can be found in Stalin’s Great Terror, when a majority of those sent to labor camps were reported on the basis of individual enmity and petty squabbles at the domestic level, thus triggering a massive web of cause and effect whose momentum overtook what began as a largely isolated phenomenon (keeping in mind, of course, that the Great Terror was, by and large, focused on Party members). Consequently, if Chávez plans on implementing something akin to this, he should find a way to do so that avoids this form of needless chaos. Moreover, perhaps this same strategy would be well-suited for Evo Morales’ Bolivia, which, in the face of ongoing reforms to, like in Chávez’s Venezuela, bring into the polity the poor and native populations who were traditionally excluded from politics, has faced challenges in the form of “autonomy votes” from its bourgeois regions.

This is essentially where I would, consequently, part ways with Chávez: whereas he seems to view his socialist struggle along populist (and, perhaps, Gramscian) lines, as a Venezuelan anti-colonialist struggle against an imperial power (the United States), he should not forget the internal antagonisms within the social substance. Hence, the ongoing political antagonisms within both Venezuela and Bolivia, in conjunction with the application of a more merciless form of domestic spying, should instead be relegated, though perhaps not entirely,¹ to the inherent antagonisms within society, as opposed to some reified external force (the United States). This division, I think, is more concrete, especially in terms of class, in Bolivia, hence my brief discussion of Morales. Nevertheless, I’m sure a more well-investigated, scientific analysis of class struggle in Venezuela would reveal similar tensions, the least of which might be the focus of a fourth part series.

1. This, of course, should in no way disregard the U.S.’s historic and present interventions in Latin America. But to make this the center of one’s political agenda is, I think, a mistake, and one that could end disastrously if it were to get out of hand or veer from the path that Chávez originally took when he was democratically elected thanks to his historic consolidation of the unrepresented within Venezuelan society. ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Downtime

Apologies to our esteemed visitors for our recent downtime, which stretched from roughly Saturday afternoon to an hour ago. At 5:00PM on Saturday, the first floor (ominously referred to as “Phase 1”) of our hosting provider’s (The Planet) datacenter experienced some sort of malfunction which caused a thermonuclear meltdown, serendipitously leaving all but our lone server in tact. Most assuredly the others were stricken down for their wicked ways.

If this kind of thing interests you any further, you can read about the ongoing troubles and temporary resolutions here.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Hillary the Populist

One question that has bugged me over the past few months is, who exactly are Hillary’s supporters? I am, of course, not talking about the stereotypical aging “die hard” feminists who refuse to give up on their support for the first woman president. If this were the case, one would suspect that such a group would be dismayed by Hillary’s “conservative” appeal, as well as the reprehensible attacks on Michelle Obama. If, on the other hand, Hillary’s supporters are simply so-called “Reagan Democrats,” that is, white working-class voters (petit bourgeoisie), why do they not support John McCain? He is, arguably, the most hawkish on foreign policy out of all of the presidential candidates¹, as well as the most “free market” orientated.

Jodi Dean has perspicuously pointed out how the term “elitist” (in reference to Barack Obama) has come to be a coded racial buzzword for “uppity” throughout the campaign. Now, of course, one can simply dismiss the (mis-)use of this term, as Barack Obama is, objectively speaking, the least wealthy, least “elitist” of the candidates (in comparison to the Clinton’s hundreds of millions of dollars and the McCain’s eight houses, corporate jet and ownership of numerous large corporations). But, as Dean emphasizes, the point is not so much a condemnation of wealth as it is a racist supposition that Obama has “risen above himself.”

On the other hand, it seems to me too easy to entirely dismiss those who accuse Obama of being “elitist” as racists, although websites such as Hillary is 44 do little to assuage my doubts in this regard. This, in my opinion, adheres too well to the Obama party-line and does little to confront the Clintonite counter-argument that decries Obama’s campaign as being sexist. Here we can see, in concrete form, a significant abstract-political problem associated with “post-[whatever]” identity politics.

I think that this electoral mystery is elucidated within Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, particularly in the paradoxically titled chapter, “Why Populism is Good Enough in Practice (But Not Good Enough in Theory),” in which Zizek critically negotiates with Ernesto Laclau’s recent change in theoretical position from radical democracy to populism. As I have yet to read any Laclau, I have to go entirely on Zizek’s account of his work, which is obviously a limitation, but one that I am not entirely concerned with in the scope of this post. According to Zizek, then, Laclau conceives of populism as

the Lacanian objet petit a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the universal dimension of the political, which is why it is “the royal road” to understanding the political… Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political at its purest: the “inflection” of the social space that can affect any political content.

Along these lines, Zizek argues that populism can be conceived of as the “overlapping of the universal with part of its own particular content,” found within Hegel’s notion of “oppositional determination” (gegensätzliche Bestimmung). Zizek continues by stating that

populism occurs when a series of particular “democratic” demands (for better social security, health services, lower taxes, against war, and so on) is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces “the people” as the universal political subject… and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of a global antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them.”

Thus, Zizek (and, ostensibly, Laclau) conceive of populism, at the most basic level, to be (1) transcendental-formal (as opposed to ontic) and (2) composed of a chain of equivalences that constitute a universal political dimension (“the people”). Finally, this avenue opens up a dichotomy between “us” and “them” (along Schmittian lines of public “friend” and “foe”). Yet, crucial here is that

The field of politics is thus caught in an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers: some particular signifiers start to function as “empty,” directly embodying the universal dimension, incorporating into the chain of equivalences which they totalize a large number of “floating” signifiers. Laclau mobilizes this gap between the “ontological” need for a populist protest vote (conditioned by the fact that the hegemonic power discourse cannot incorporate a series of popular demands) and the contingent ontic content to which this vote gets attached…

Perhaps, given this formula, one should do the unthinkable and take Hillary’s statements that she is the “populist candidate,” not as a cynical political ploy, but literally. Regardless of her objective status (in terms of wealth, class position, and numerous political positions), her “ontic content,” her status as a “populist candidate,” is purely contingent, the result of a formal necessity at the level of the direct expression of the chain of equivalences that constitute “the people.” Consequently, one should not read anything into her candidacy as such. Instead, one should concentrate on the problem at the theoretical level. As Zizek concludes, populism is limited by an ideological mystification, the attempt to suture the inherent antagonism (within society) by transubstantiating it into an external one (hence, “us” vs. “them”).

Yet Obama’s campaign is hardly without its own limitations. On the topic of Chantal Mouffe’s “democratic paradox,” Zizek notes that the “main threat to democracy in today’s democratic countries resides in… the death of the political through the ‘commodification’ of politics.

What is at stake here is not primarily the way politicians are packaged and sold as merchandise at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they involve a competition between different merchandise-parties, and our votes are like money which buys the government we want. What gets lost in such a view of politics as just another service we buy is politics as a shared public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.

The reduction of politics to ontic commodities (the way a politician or party might be “branded” or commodified) and the ontological political-being-as-commodification (the function of the political relegated to that of the commodity-form) points to the vacuousness of contemporary so-called “post-ideological” politics that Obama (at least in part) exemplifies.² It not only reduces “change” to a mere life-style commodity, but it also concedes to the economic-reductionist view of politics as “just another service” to be provided (hence the status of “change,” like that of money, as a pure “empty signifier”). This view thereby obscures the “real change” that politics, at its core, is able to achieve: that of making possible what, retroactively, seemed impossible; changing the entire coordinates of social reality.

Yet, in the opposition between the vacuous post-modern “commodification” of politics and populist ideological mystification, one should, perhaps unexpectedly, support the former. As one may notice, the above paragraph is incredibly cliché, a very stereotypical critique of the “commodification” of daily life, the reduction of things into brand names, etc. Hence, post-modern politics takes on the status of a fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that everything, including politics, is commodified), but nevertheless…” Thus, while populism obscures the objective status antagonism located within fetishistic disavowal through the reification of antagonism into an external Other (“them”), in contrast to “the people,” post-modern politics allows one to begin the project of genuine emancipatory politics by locating the fetishistic object, the object at the center of libidinal cathexis that allows for one to avoid subjectively assuming what one objectively knows.

1. At the very least, this is the image that he has attempted to cultivate, although, as the L.A. Times has pointed out, his foreign policy record is, at best, mixed ↩
2. As a caveat I will say that Obama’s rhetorical abilities and devotional fans are, in fact, a positive contradiction to this thesis. ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

The Politicization of Disaster

In regards to the nearly 10,000 children who’ve died in China’s most recent earthquake, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the way the disaster has become politicized at local levels, leading to demonstrations against the government for having failed to address the unsafe building conditions prior to the earthquake, as well as exaggerating the role they played in disaster recovery. Concerning the issue, the Times has this to say:

The protests threaten to undermine the government’s attempts to promote its response to the quake as effective and to highlight heroic rescue efforts by the People’s Liberation Army, which has dispatched 150,000 soldiers to the region. Censors have blocked detailed reporting of the schools controversy by the state-run media, but a photo of Mr. Jiang kneeling before protesters has become a sensation on some Web forums, bringing national attention to the incident.

… The authorities in Beijing appear to recognize the delicacy of the issue. On Monday, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, Wang Xuming, promised a reassessment of school buildings in quake zones, adding that those responsible for cutting corners on school construction would be “severely punished.”

The article goes into more detail regarding the protests aimed against specific officials who the parents have identified as being negligent in regards to building safety conditions. What makes this particularly interesting is that it demonstrates that even so-called “totalitarian” states (in truth, China’s politics could be more aptly described as pragmatic authoritarianism) must be responsive to their citizens. The distribution of power between the (Party-)State and its People is never fully one-sided, even at the very limits of delegitimization. The events have spurred, to varying degrees, a form of local collective action against party bosses that are forced to acquiesce to the demands of the rightfully enraged parents. The only truly serious political question is whether this politicized message will come to play a crucial role at the level of national politics, against any predictable depoliticizing logic of “victimization.”

But I think what’s especially breathtaking here is that, while this development seems somewhat unremarkable, can anyone imagine the same procedure taking place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Not at the level of talking-head-faux-outrage, but the direct politicization of the disaster and the mobilization of the poor against the state apparatus and its varyingly corresponding parties. The irony is that in the U.S., contrary to China, such a development would be truly unfathomable, despite the latter’s aforementioned “totalitarianism.”

With the Olympic games coming up in a matter of months, the question that remains will be what, if anything, will occur in China. On the one hand, it is more than likely the case that things will continue running smoothly and any events that appear to disturb the smooth run of things will simply appear as “blips” on the radar screen. Yet, the reduction of such events to mere “blips” ignores a key Marxist insight apropos capitalism’s cyclic fluctuations (as well as Freud’s insight in regards to the symptom): these these momentary lapses represent the repressed “truth” of a ruling order. To varying degrees, they are capable of carrying with them a deeper truth-procedure towards an Event. On the topic of politicization, however, the crucial question is what kind of Truth emerges in the midst of an event. Will the masses opt for neoliberal ideology as did a number of post-Communist countries (including Russia), or will something new emerge? Obviously, then, one shouldn’t blindly throw a monkey wrench in a machine without in some way discerning out of that action what will emerge in its aftermath.

On a more macroscopic level, what humanitarian ideology, a thoroughly depoliticizing bourgeois ideology if there ever was one, has taught us is that natural disasters, which render people into victims, require the benevolence of some privileged third party capable of administrating the affairs. Yet, what if the appearance of disaster (e.g., global warming) and its after effects points to a general failure at the level not only of state-citizen interaction, but at the level of Capital as well. That is to say, what if the logic of Capital does not accommodate itself to disaster relief, and hence relies upon the ideological mystification of humans reduced to the status of “victims” to elicit support at the individual level. Consequently, the politicization of disasters and the formation of local collective action seems like a positive development for the most marginalized members of society (those are disproportionately affected by such disasters) against the ruling strata. And this, of course, is not simply the case for impoverished Third World countries: we should recall the events of Katrina and keep them in mind when developments such as these arise, in order to seize them before they dissipate under the guise of mere “blips” on the radar.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 7 Comments

Indiana Jones and the Family Myth

I recently saw the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and was pleased to find a film that so easily accommodated itself to a psychoanalytic interpretation. I suppose, as a general principle, however, that the majority of mainstream Hollywood films are perfect terrain for examining the contours of today’s ideological constellation from a variety of angles: in this respect, Indiana Jones did not surprise in the least.

The film takes place in 1957 when Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) leads a convoy of Soviets (disguised as American soldiers) to infiltrate an American military base in Nevada, where they force Indiana Jones to lead them to a crate containing the remains of a mysterious alien creature. Following Dr. Jones’ escape, he learns from a young greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LeBeouf) that the Soviets are after the alien’s crystal skull in Peru.

The film gets interesting when Indiana flies to Peru in order to rescue his kidnapped colleague, Dr. Harold Oxley, and retrieve the crystal skull before the Soviets, with the help of Mutt Williams. After coming across a long lost love in Peru, Dr. Jones discovers to his surprise that Mutt is in fact his son. It is from this development that the film should be properly understood. As Slavoj Zizek outlines in his In Defense of Lost Causes, a common trope in Hollywood cinema, ranging from Deep Impact and Armageddon to Reds and Doctor Zhivago, is to place a family drama against the backdrop of a catastrophic global conflict or event. This is quite common in a number of Steven Spielberg’s films, where the cataclysmic tale obfuscates the truth located at the level of the so-called “family myth.” To name several examples Zizek gives, Jurassic Park is effectively a story of a paleontologist (Sam Niell) coming to terms with the role of the father. In the very beginning of the film, the dinosaur bone acts as an objective correlative to the paternal superego, which manifests itself in the incarnation of the dinosaur’s unrestrained fury. As Zizek points out, it is precisely when the dinosaur bone is dropped from the tree in the scene where Sam Niell and the kids are hiding from the dinosaurs, where he finally comes to terms with fatherhood, that the dinosaurs emerge as friendly and herbivorous. The same logic of the family myth is operative in Schindler’s List, in which Schindler is plays the father figure in contrast to the infantilized Jews; the Nazis here are merely a poor substitute for dinosaurs. And, again, the family myth can be found in E.T., in which E.T. merely stands as a “vanishing mediator,” a substitute father, until the young boy’s single mother befriends the male scientist at the end of the film (signaling the entry of the “true” father figure and, consequently, E.T. can now “phone home”).

In Indiana Jones, the true “lost object” is here not the crystal skull: what the crystal skull stands for is objet petit a, a positivized lack that merely obfuscates the “true” lack, that of Indiana Jones himself as father figure. In returning to Peru, Dr. Jones effectively returns to his “rightful place” within the Oedipal family model, just at the moment that the son’s rebellion begins to threaten their non-Oedipal cohesion (which would, following this model, require the mother to adorn the phallus). In re-reading the developments of the latest film, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Indiana Jones left behind the chance to be a father: this is how to read his pathological fear of snakes, as a fear of the father’s phallus. However, after coming to terms with his fatherhood, Dr. Jones immediately reprimands his son for a transgression he formerly had condoned (“But you said not attending college was fine!” “That was before I knew I was your father!”). The change in perspective is merely at the level of the Symbolic Law, of assuming the Name-of-the-Father. Consequently, the family myth in Indiana Jones, unsurprisingly, simply reifies the ideological apparatus of the nuclear family as a normative model, a model which reached its apogee (as an ego ideal) precisely during the 1950s.

Thus, far from depicting a Cold War showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and, humorously, none other than the Russian Communist Party has denounced the film for “distorting history” and “provok[ing] a new Cold War”), the film stages a conflict between the Oedipal nuclear family and the radically anti-Oedipal matriarchal order, embodied in the figure of Irina Spalko, who commands a large army of disposable male concubines. It is thus no surprise that her weapon of choice is the sword, the necessary correlative to the snake. The sword fight between Mutt, who fields his small retractable blade, and Irina thus stages a rather absurd spectacle at the level of phallic imagery.

The end of the film, moreover, should be read very precisely: when Dr. Jones remarks that Irina was after knowledge, this should be understood essentially as a necessary error due to his newly adorned status as father (Master). What Irina was after, what reduced her to rubble, was her search for Truth, which, in the analytic sense, refers to the articulation of the analysand’s desire. In contrast, Lacan conceives of Knowledge as a signifying chain (S₂, S₃, S₄, etc.) that supplements the discourse of the Master (S₁), its “quilting point” that ensures signification. We should therefore read the film symptomatically: the “kingdom,” which is found inside the ‘skull’ of a rock formation shaped as a man’s face, is none other than the dimension of Indiana Jones’ unconscious. Consequently, Indiana Jones, like a true obsessional neurotic, staves off the realization of analytic Truth in favor of the Master’s Knowledge, in order to retain his desire, that of being an adventurous archaeologist (no wonder “every kind of archaeological treasure” is found within the “kingdom,” it is simply the objective correlative to Dr. Jones’ “traversing of the fantasy”). Consequently, if Dr. Jones had chosen the side of Truth, he, like Irina, would have been reduced to rubble, undergone “subjective destitution”: what would have been left go under so many names, from the Hegelian “night of the world” to the Cartesian “cogito.” Instead, we end with a very typical marriage scene, thus confirming the results of his having chosen Knowledge over Truth. This is not surprising, as Dr. Jones makes the very same quip apropos “Truth” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, remarking on how “archaeology is about fact. If you want truth, philosophy courses are right next door.”

The true reading of the film, therefore, is not to conceive of it along strictly political lines. The rather pointless and disposable “capitalist” character points to this fact, as his inclusion simply attempts to oppose the film to standard Cold War narratives that demonize Communism. Spielberg here attempts to show how capitalism too, if gone unchecked, can be excessive as well, and thus we need patriotic, good-hearted liberals like Indiana Jones, who represent both the epitome of physical strength (Achilles, along with his own kind of “Achilles’ heel”) and cunning (Odysseus and his “myth of Enlightenment”). As has been examined, the true ideological element of the film resides in its trumpeting of the Oedipal model in the form of the family myth, a recurring motif throughout both numerous Spielberg films as well as throughout Hollywood cinema in general, against the anti-Oedipal matrix of unbalanced matriarchal jouissance.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to point out the numerous and rather odd references to Werner Herzog’s films in Indiana Jones: from the myth of Don Lope de Aguirre to the shooting location of Iquitos, the same location as in Fitzcarraldo, and finally the horribly animated monkeys that attack Irina, similar to those on the flotilla with Klaus Kinksi at the famous ending sequence of Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Zizek: Theory, Politics, Culture

I recently read Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique, which, for those that don’t know, is an analysis of Marxian political economy from the transcendental perspective of Kantian ethics, and Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, which I thought was tremendously well written considering the breadth of abstruse theory dealt with. Not to say that Karatani’s wasn’t, in fact Karatani’s was probably just as equally well written, although it was translated, so maybe I should just thank the translator.

Anyhow, I started reading Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes and, although it’s whimsically riveting, I can’t help but hope that Zizek’s next book will be a much more condensed attempt at touching upon the real core of his work (transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, according to Johnston). Essentially, In Defense of Lost Causes seems to me to be applying this Kantian notion of “bracketing” by limiting intense theoretical discussion in favor of a Hegelo-Lacanian analysis of politics and popular culture (but I’m only fifty pages into it, so perhaps this isn’t the case, but the lack of citations and the title of the book is highly suggestive…). If In Defense of Lost Causes brackets “high” theory, then perhaps we may look forward to a text that brackets (“low”) popular culture and politics as sources of deviation from a more rigorous thesis. This, I think, would be interesting, as it would concretize the essentially theoretical notion of “parallax,” as developed by Karatani (vis-a-vis Kant) and later expanded on by Zizek in The Parallax View, by putting it into practice in regards to his publishing.

So, again, it would be really interesting, then, to have a very focused work (akin to Tarrying with the Negative or The Parallax View) deploying, in his own words, a more coherently formulated account of self-relating negativity (Hegel’s “night of the word,” Descartes’ cogito, etc.). Perhaps even more interesting would be a direct engagement with Johnston’s text and, perhaps, drawing concrete political conclusions from it, which Johnston’s text, for a variety of reasons I’m sure, usually abstains from (with a deliberate reference to Kantian bracketing, in his case). And I would say this would still abide by this bracketing principle since any political discussion would be held off until the very end of the dialectic.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

On Speculation

V. I. Lenin:

We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot.

(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Happy May Day

To celebrate, here’s a copy of the Internationale in German:

Check out some of these great posts:

• Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, and make merry while ye May (Historiann)
• May Day Greetings (Lenin’s Tomb)
• Still Nothing to Lose But Our Chains, After All These Years (The Weblog)
• Dockworkers Protest Iraq War (NY Times)
• International Workers’ Day Iconography (Greenpagan)
• International Workers’ Day (Wikipedia)
• All Out For May Day! (Crooked Timber)
• Immigrant Rights Day of Action (AFL-CIO, DC Metro Council)
• Workers of the World Unite (Bitch Ph.D.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

366 Songs: March EP

As spring approaches, so does a new 366 Songs EP.

Get the best of my March recordings here. As a whole, I was much more comfortable with this month than the previous two. It was a little harder to cut it down to six.

1: Petunia ‘Possession’ is nine tenths of this song, which I recorded in my favorite open tuning, Open E. ‘Projection’ is probably the leftover tenth.

2: Ashes and Ashes I couldn’t decide, would it be ‘wailing wall’ or ‘western wall’? In this take ‘wailing’ made the cut, and the drone was most convincing here, so I went with it. Half of this take’s lyrics are improvised, which is a technique I like to use so that the demo doesn’t become too stodgy.

3: The Sound of Squealing Brakes I cannot count the number of times I have driven around late at night with the windows down and radio on. I am usually too worried about whether I’m speeding or going too slow to fall asleep. That’s where this comes from, it’s sung with a bravado that seems unusual to me.

4: Doing Fine Old folks homes interest me. I imagine they’re a lot like dorms, except you get your own bathroom, which is nice.

5: Laughing Stock I really wonder what my neighbors think when I’m recording backing vocals like these. The walls are paper thin, they can’t hear the rest of the song playing in my headphones. It must sound like strange moaning. One day I’m going to get some backup singers.

6: Goose in My Pillow Another duet with myself. Sleep was a major theme this month as I had bouts of insomnia. At one point I became completely nocturnal. I feel that was helpful, but I’m done with that now.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Three Obvious Strategies to Fix Windows

Windows is a fat Paris Hilton. You want it to be a Wheaties box athlete. Put Windows on a diet, take away it’s toys and designer clothes. Make it run around the track a few thousand times. Give it a new mantra: Performance, performance, performance.

Fix XP (or Vista), Work On Incremental Updates

Stop hyping the next release of Windows as the solution to the problems of the current Windows. Fix and streamline Windows XP, and then issue incremental updates based on that platform. Fix security issues, crash problems, rewrite thousands upon thousands of lines of code, go over it with a fine tooth comb until you’re absolutely sure your foundation is strong, then build.

Do what Apple does and hype your service pack updates as OS revisions. Charge $100, release yearly. The problem with issuing epic OS updates: it’s like fasting for a week to loose weight instead of maintaining a healthy diet. By fixing your problems as you go along, you stop them from compounding. No one will be expecting a magic life changing OS, they’ll be expecting a better version of XP. That’s easier to ship and to build.

Reconsider Everything

Rebuild Windows from the bottom up. You’ve done this to an extent. What I’m talking about is reconsidering everything you thought you knew about Windows. Do what Decartes did (skip the needy proof on God). Ask stupid questions, reconsider design, coding, user-interface, and OS philosophy.

Your company is in the unique position where it has the resources and capital to remake an entire OS from scratch. Take your time and consider what you’re doing very carefully. Some might even make the suggestion of open-source cooperation, which is great for code, but you’re going to need a dictatorship with a strong vision to make a great OS.

Simplify, Become Utilitarian

One version. One price. One name. One look.

You do not need to make yourself into Apple to be successful, you do not need to make yourself Linux. Maintain simple visual appeal with no flashy graphics. Make a working, useful OS with only those features which are useful. Get rid of all the third-party shit.

—Mark Elliot Cullen 3 Comments