True/False & What Else? III: Terror in Powerlessness, Research Time, 09/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . Louis Althusser is the first author I came across to have discussed that undercurrent tradition of political thinking. The materialist democrats – Baruch Spinoza, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Karl Marx.

Now, I discovered this not in one of his books of philosophy, but in his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever. This is in many ways a very disturbing book – I recommend it highly. 

Althusser wrote two autobiographies. The first was a fairly straightforward description of his life up to his general retirement from teaching in the mid-1970s. The next was The Future Lasts Forever, a blur of memories, traumatic terror, fragmentary recollections of the collapse of his subjectivity, and philosophical reflection on society and individuality.

One major concept of horror is that unspeakable terrors
exist under the comforting fabric of ordinary life. I've
been thinking a bit about horror tropes lately.

He was prompted to write that second, much more fascinating, autobiography by a need to set the record straight. See, Althusser had a catastrophic mental breakdown in 1980 and murdered his wife Helene Rytmann, strangling her. He was in such a state at the time that the French courts declared him unfit to stand trial. 

So not only did Althusser never face punishment for the killing, but there wasn’t even a detailed investigation into the causes of the act. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution and stayed there for about four years. 

When he was released, he wrote The Future Lasts Forever to set the record as straight as he could, and at least take some of the power over his public image back from the tabloid press. 

It wasn’t a matter of mounting a counter-argument to the press’ allegations that Althusser was a killer who got away with it. You can't really take that book as anything but an unfolding portrait of a broken mind. It was a demonstration that Althusser as a subject was in a far different, more disturbing world than the terms of sensationalist hackery could understand.

Some of his claims I can’t take seriously. I can’t consider his claim that he never finished reading Capital, never really studied much Marx in the first place, as a straightforward confession. He writes and interprets with too much creativity to plagiarize or spin his wheels. 

The Althusser of The Future Lasts Forever is a collapsed person, shattered completely. You don’t read that book looking for facts – you read it looking for the moments of lucidity. 

What kind of horror does a person experience when they
try to reckon with their own mental breakdown? When
that breakdown was so intense that he strangled his
wife and lifelong companion to death?

Their emergence is the most terrifying tragedy in the story, the moments when he realizes the magnitude of what he did, even if he’s talking about something else entirely.

One of the many terrifying threads in that autobiography was his devotion to that tradition of political philosophy – materialist democrats. In this tradition, the world was incredibly complicated, unable to be reduced to any simple schema and have your ideas remain at all adequate. Politics was rough and gritty. 

Society could be transformed, but it would mean literally revolutionizing the terms in which that whole society lived and understood their own lives. 

And what was Althusser’s contribution to that? To me, he makes for a profound challenge. By removing agency from individuals, he made each person a function of their society. 

He presents a conundrum that I don’t really see any way out of, unless you simply reject his terms. If individuals are functions of their societies – expressions of an ideology – then you can’t really be a revolutionary. Even though he was a communist activist his entire life. 

When he’s talking about the structure of an ideology – the social imaginary and moral framework of a people – Althusser provides some valuable insights. I'm going to get into that next post. 

But the paradoxes of his thinking – when you look at them on the large scale of his entire corpus and life – are all vicious. Such a deterministic structuralism – macro determining the activity of the meso – just can’t fit with being a revolutionary. You can't think that changing the world is possible if you think that the world always has agency over you.

Even with being a philosopher. It's an individual's conceptual creativity that lets us understand events and processes of universal importance. Individuality as an organism can't be denied without a kind of willful ignorance of real life.

The parts have to shape the whole just as the whole shapes the parts. Activity is a feedback loop among all constituents. Either everything is active, or there’s no activity at all. Passivity – being the object of an action – is only relative to the action itself. Not determining, but overpowering. 

Individuality can’t be escaped. The belief itself would be a false ideology. But what does that even really mean? False ideology from true ideology? Or is it more complex than that? Of course it is. . . . To Be Continued

Truth Is the Egg that Splats on Your Face, Jamming, 24/07/2015

I was always planning to write about something in the news for Friday. After a few more philosophical and historical posts about my research, I thought I was due. But one of my Twitter friends linked an article this week that made me want to explore a problem in public relations.

Yes, it was about Ashley Madison.*

* Probably better than my original idea, a rant about the Iran deal and the exhaustion of global American power.

And yes, the popular reception of the Ashley Madison hack was immensely hypocritical coming in the same week as Gawker's outing of a high-ranking Condé Nast editor who no one is now naming out of contrition.** Dan Savage said it well enough that I can simply link to it. Shaming one rich person for an affair is terrible, but humiliating and compromising 37 million regular people is fine.

** This even though we all know who it is from having read the original Gawker story. I can say it because, not only do we know who it is, I’m one guy with kind of an anti-authoritarian streak. It’s David Geithner. Tim Geithner’s brother. Who is married to a woman and has sex with men. Soap opera country.

So incredibly cheesy.

That’s a moment of popular hypocrisy that I can acknowledge and move on. Because I’m most interested in exploring an analysis at PR News about how Ashley Madison’s public relations department was caught flat-footed by the hack. Well, as anyone would be with such a catastrophic compromise in your company’s confidential data.

The brief set of solutions that the article’s author, Matthew Schwartz, recommended have to do with maintaining a solid relationship between the PR and IT department. Ashley Madison’s major PR messages were that their information was absolutely secure from any hack, attack, or thievery. They promoted themselves as “the last truly secure space on the internet.”

If the PR folks had interacted with the IT department, they would have known that there is no truly absolute security on the internet. Every security system has its vulnerabilities, simply because of the complexity of software architecture, and the rigid nature of the logic of computer programs.

A company’s level of internet security is only as strong as its attackers are weak. If your data is secure, it’s only because no one has thought of how they can steal it – yet. 

Always, there is yet.

This is true. It’s a basic truth of internet security that you can glean from an afternoon chatting with your company’s IT folks over coffee, or reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I don’t think the problem was that Ashley Madison PR was somehow not knowledgeable about how internet security works.

The problem was that the priority of Ashley Madison’s PR department was not set to respect the company’s duty to be honest with their clients about the limits of internet security. Their priority was to disseminate messages that would encourage people to gravitate to Ashley Madison when they wanted adulterous services.

That’s a marketing priority. And it’s very easy for marketing priorities to leave out information that complicates how someone understands a company’s business, if that information would make them skeptical. 

“Ashley Madison is perfectly secure” is a simple message that encourages people to use the website for their secret sex transactions. “Ashley Madison does a generally very good job with security and we hire the best people, but at a particular level, we’re still constantly playing catch-up to the innovations of cyber-criminals and web malignants, just like every other business and government on Earth,” not so much.

The troubling part about PR is that it can be in the department’s best interests to obscure information that would make people think twice about becoming customers or clients. It’s the company’s best interests too, at least in the immediate frame of reference. 

Ultimately, PR is caught between the need to draw people to their business and the need to be open and honest with the people who’ve trusted their business. 

It isn’t a lie to omit a truth, but trust requires openness.

A Stationary War Machine: When Men Become Weapons, Research Time, 19/08/2014

Race riots are so 1960s. The very concept almost feels like a dinosaur, an idea we thought had gone extinct. No one ever said this about the conflict on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. But that’s what it is. A race riot.

A young man is murdered and a neighbourhood
explodes. All too common in America today. Once is
too often.

Yet it is also more than a race riot. Ferguson is different from previous conflicts between a racialized group and wider society because the violence we’ve seen in that city was purposely stoked by police actions. Protests of Trayvon Martin’s killing at the hands of a Neighbourhood Watch member in Florida two years ago did not mutate into violent riots that destroyed communities and infrastructure. Protests of Mike Brown’s killing at the hands of a police officer did. 

It is obvious what the material difference is. When the St. Louis County police confronted the protesters, they were wearing camo gear, carrying military-grade assault rifles, and firing tear gas and rubber bullets. When the Missouri Highway Patrol accompanied the protesters, they were wearing ordinary blue and black police uniforms, and the largest gun they carried was their standard sidearm. Those protests were peaceful affairs that saw a more ethnically-integrated police force marching in tandem with an outraged people, many even sharing their pain and outrage. 

This moment of calm would not last. I doubt even the most optimistic residents of Ferguson suspected it would.* Very little trust seems to have existed between the people of Ferguson and their law enforcement officials. In a city where the revenue of police departments depend on their harassing residents for parking and driving tickets, it combines with tensions between a virtually all-white force (the number of non-white officers so low as to be statistically insignificant) to create a social environment of institutionalized predation. 

* However, I don’t exactly have the funds as an independent journalist barely managing to restart this section of his career to travel to Missouri to speak with the city’s residents. If anyone wants to offer me those funds, I would not waste them.

This is even without factoring the validity of mounting anecdotal evidence of profit-free police harassment of black residents and the shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old. This is even without the contemptible indignity of trying to criminalize Mike Brown with the claim that he was an armed robbery suspect at the time of his murder, a charge which even the owner of the store refutes, and which the officer who killed him didn’t know anyway. Last time I checked, petty theft wasn’t an offence warranting summary execution in Missouri.

Still, within days after peace was restored to the protests, looting and violence began again, and Missouri governor Jay Nixon has invoked emergency powers to assign a curfew to the entire city, essentially imprisoning its population as an act of collective punishment. The National Guard, the United States’ actual domestic armed forces, is now enforcing the curfew in the city. Violence continues. 

• • •

But the phenomenon of Ferguson is more complex than high-grade enormous weapons simply “going to someone’s head” in the words of America’s new national conscience Jon Oliver. A person’s self-conception is rarely dominated by an image that he would recognize as fully human. We are processes more than static bodies, and our understandings shift as readily as our states of being. Ta’Nehisi Coates discusses in The Atlantic the power that American police forces have typically held over black people’s bodies in the country’s history. 

Mapping is an act of definition,
labelling, ranking.

But the militarization of the police doesn’t just affect black bodies. It transforms men into weapons. Police officers do not simply become enforcers of the law when they don the uniform. They also become agents of the state, and this is a decision with profound dangers. The state is an institution that striates society, organizing it into clearly mapped coordinates. These coordinates are not simple locations, but can carry complex identifying marks. These are the marks of hierarchy, the marks by which one knows one’s place in the state order.

Perhaps Coates would call them the marks on black bodies over the centuries: the scars of whips, the burns of plantation brands, rope burns along the neck, even the haphazard scars of a billy club assault, or the pink and red craters of a rubber bullet entering the thigh or the abdomen. Rank order can be instituted through the honesty of direct violence, but more often it is done through the personality-free institution of bureaucratic rules. The state, in the name of the people, provides services for human welfare, and possibly even flourishing. But to claim them, one must become a number in the complex system of dispersing those goods. 

Your social lifelines through your state are given or revoked not by the bureaucrat himself; that poor man is only a functionary, and often is sincerely sorry for the hardship he must bestow. The bureaucratic rules themselves define what the institution does. Will the taxpayers subsidize the police? Or will it be the hunt for parking and speeding violators? Which burden is more vulnerable to corruption by old prejudices? I think that much is clear. Driving While Black is the offence so common that it became a joke.

If the policeman becomes the tool of striation, part of a machine that organizes society by enforcing rank, then the militarization of the modern American police department introduces a strange new element to this dynamic. The last 20 years have seen the American military adapt its arsenal to desert warfare. The desert is a smooth space where a destructive force can move like lightning.** Massive metal bodies can shoot across these spaces, moving almost like pure destructive energy.

** The analogy can be coincidental if you’re me, or intentional if you prefer to think in echoes of devils.

We saw it in America’s two invasions of Iraq. We can see it today in the explosion of the Islamic State through the countryside of eastern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan. Only in the cities and the mountains can these armies genuinely encounter resistance. Even then, the resistance must be dedicated to the prospect of extreme casualties, willing to scorch its own earth to drive the invaders away.

These forces were unleashed upon Ferguson, without even the modicum of self-consciousness lying in the discipline of the military infantryman never to point his rifle as a default stance. Even in a war machine as powerful as lightning, these checks of small mercies exist. Not so for the undertrained war machine let loose in Ferguson. The application of machines whose purpose is to destroy countries on a city full of barely armed protesters destroys inescapably. The war machines typically set loose in the desert abandon their targets as quickly as they attack, always moving on to the next. Unlike the desert, the city of Ferguson experiences wave after wave, because the material components of warfare in smooth spaces have been given to the apparatus of the state, and so focussed intently on a single place.

For more detail on these concepts of striated
space and the war machine, read 1000 Plateaus,
chapters 14, 12, and 13.

One of the sick advantages of bureaucracy as a means of oppression is that it encourages docility. The pain is so slow to inflict that its daily dose is never more than an annoyance. The power of a weaponized people – the St. Louis County police and the Missouri National Guard – provokes explosions in reaction. Old-fashioned moral categories of blameworthiness cannot really be applied here. The population of Ferguson have become victims of rapid violence. Self-consciousness and self-control shattered, rage at these latest blatant injustices fuel action. 

Police, too, have become little more than machines channelling the violence of their armour and vehicles, and the destructive racism of their anger. When given permission to explode, the explosion occurs across all dimensions of their existence. A blaze fuels its own rampage on air alone, and this last week of violence has turned people into fires. 

Fear of the Future, Research Time, 20/02/2014

While I was publishing my extended riff on the institutionalization of creative writing, I was securing a couple of journalistic publications, working on a new theatre script, preparing some promotion for Under the Trees, Eaten, continuing some research for the Utopias project, and preparing to move apartments. Among a few other things. 

But my Utopias research discovered another interesting take on the nature of authority that could either be useful for the analysis, or a head-scratching anomaly for it. I still haven’t quite figured that out. Part of Zizek’s analysis of authoritarianism involved the example of Josef Fritzl. This was the case of an Austrian man who, in August 2008, was discovered to have spent the previous 24 years holding his now-middle-aged daughter captive in a cellar under his house. He had frequently raped her and bore seven children with her, though one died shortly after childbirth. Three of them were raised entirely in the cellar, and another three were raised by the elderly Josef and his wife, the latter children regarded as foundlings they had adopted.

The immensely creepy Josef Fritzl is led into court.

Zizek examines Fritzl’s behaviour toward his daughter and incestuous grand/children over those 24 years to reach a more disturbing conclusion than even the popular reporting did. I remember it being widely regarded at the time as a case of a twisted, deranged sex criminal. Something like the Ariel Castro case today.* Reports in the media at the time were also flabbergasted at how such a thing could go unnoticed for 24 years by neighbours, and even Fritzl’s wife. News reporters often ran analysis pieces discussing the excessive politeness of Austrians, their tendency (almost pathological in this case) to leave others to their own business without interference. Zizek interprets Fritzl in an even stranger and horrifying light. 

* Castro began kidnapping women in 2002, while Fritzl was only discovered in 2008, so there is no way we can consider Castro to be a Fritzl copycat. I wonder how many other such crimes over the years have gone undiscovered, and how many women who are simply not prioritized in missing persons investigations are actually in cellars and attics, unseen outside for years or decades.

Zizek describes Fritzl’s behaviour toward his grand/children in the cellar as mimicking a strange kind of normalcy: visiting them regularly, playing with the small ones, and watching television with them. No matter how much he may have been a horrifying spectre to his daughter, who was his imprisoned incestuous rape victim for over two decades, his day-to-day interaction with this hidden family followed all the trappings of an ordinary family man. Zizek refers to Fritzl’s own accounts of himself where he speaks of his love for his children and grand/children, his desire to protect them from the evils of the wider world. Paternal care is perverted to justify torture.

This is how Zizek finds the political content of Fritzl’s pathology: he is the paradigm case, on a micro scale, of the paternalistic authoritarian, for whom oppression and control is an expression of love. He interprets the same pattern in Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship of Romania: the tight social controls of his government over the behaviour of the people is for their own good, to protect them from the dangers of the wider world for which they lack the fortitude to handle. 

Fear of the future, of the development of a people, is the driving force of the temporal relationship and conception here. The most deluded parent is the one who has become incapable of understanding the experience, maturity, and adulthood of their children. They universalize the present moment of childhood and immaturity to all times, never understanding that such states of being change. 

This political pathology reveals the temporal dimension of a central element of democracy: that no matter how good a government may be, it must at some point leave power and change itself. The movement of time brings flux, and the imposition of stability over that flux will inevitably become repression. We must not ignore the reality of the yet-to-exist future for the sake of constructing an infinitely enduring present.