bloodlines of legitimation

AKMA notes the curious fact that the "legitimate" online offerings from music companies typically offer no added value, no lyrics, no liner notes, nuthin', in other words, that would differentiate the "legitimate" from the pirated file.

I'll add this one to the pile of examples of USian Grifterism (a pile which includes, among other things, certain forms of mortgages, FEMA, several major corporations and the entire Bush Administration).

For the record co's, the thing that makes their pay-for-it files "legitimate" has nothing to do with the listener, or with the music, or with the quality of the file. It has to do with the contractual relationship of the corporation to the property.

This is the working definition of legitimacy in USia. It's also the reason we have no culture, no community, and no public forums for consensual intelligence. Legitimacy by contract is not love. It is the blood of USia, and it's poison.

imhfo, of course.

phyzzics of nooz

Solid: A small community of speakers can probably agree, more or less, on what's the news.

Liquid: A larger community, with a broader spectrum of the real and of views thereof, has more difficulty, and probablistically will be happier with algorithms than with any single vendor's version of "the" news. Especially when the vendor's life support consists mostly of vending advertisements for entities that aim to control credit markets, environment, intellectual property, "entertainment," etc.

Gas: Scale up beyond that larger community and the very notion of "news" begins to sputter, undergo another phase change. What scalable technique, method, or epistemology do we have to sensibly represent "the news" to the gathering digital maelstrom of global voices? The news about the war in Iraq is that there is no news, no single report, however complex, that can adequately acquit itself to all speaking communities of all nations of all earths.

Reading and rendering

A:

sympathy inescapably inflects understanding, and someone who withholds full sympathy (for whatever reasons, I’m not judging the reasons in question) holds back from the opportunity of fuller apprehension. AKMA

P:

I would suggest that what you are missing is the unique status of the biblical writings precisely as Scripture. . . . in fact, the Bible is simply a collection of occasional writings written over a period of a thousand years, pulled together as a collection by a religious community called the Christian Church. And this community insists that this collection of writings be regarded as one book authored by the Creator of the universe, i.e, as Scripture.

. . .

The answer is patent: the community that collected and canonized these writings must provide the rules for the book's proper interpretation. Hence my claim, which is an uncontroversial claim for catholic Christians, that the Bible can only be properly understood within the Church, by the Church. The Bible can be read in any number of different ways; but if one wants to read the book as Scripture, then one needs to learn from the Church how to do so.

I think I understand "A" - the clarification of AKMA's to an earlier post in which he at least in part addressed my questions here.

The comments under "P" (who goes by Pontificator - I think this was his site - they are found in full here) raise way more questions than they resolve. To proclaim that 1000 years of work by a people that carefully culled, meditated, commented, remembered and revised its tradition was in fact "pulled together" by an entirely other community, Christians, is to forget - to annul -- any other basis for the writing and reading of these works than the one which Pontificator happens to espouse.

The pretty total obliteration of the other was what I was trying to look into in my earlier comment -- to read the Bible as Scripture apparently means to arrive at a species of intelligibility less by dint of careful and critical attention than by removing any alien features that might complicate what for all we know could be a preordained meaning imposed ab extra.

• Marketing 101: Reinforce your target market's sense of its own identity by deep-sixing its awareness of any other markets.

I see AKMA's thought as pretty clearly opposed to Pontificator's. AKMA appears to say that absent total sympathy, openness, to what the text via all its myriad modes of signification points to, something will be missed, lost. There is no absolute either/or of intelligibility, yet some aspect of imaginative inspiration, some trace or inkling of what lies infinitely beyond the rarest overtones of the text, is in play.

Pontificator is saying a reader facing the Bible without the Pontificator's posse is consigned hopelessly to dealing with something "fundamentally unintelligible." This seems pretty either/or-ish.

The difference in tone and spirit between the two views seems huge: AKMA's mode of reading involves the intimacy of generous attention, combined with critical acumen. Pontificator, in line
with his Roman predecessors, will advise that anyone who ventures into the intimacy of that resonant chamber without the consensus fidelium is at risk of all manner of waylaying phantasmata of meaning.

Yet I wonder if somewhere along the hermeneutic moebius A and P don't converge, in answering what seems the next inevitable question:

Can the consensus fidelium be at odds with philology?

What is there about the sacred? What does it confer upon anything designated as such, and/or upon the designator of anything designated as such, that sets it apart from those who do not regard it as sacred?

Because the community agrees the text is sacred, it can, it is said, read it aright. But early on, before the canon was formed, the community doing the canonizing did not have a consensus telling it what were the possible significations among which it had to choose. What could their decisions vis a vis the canonical have been based on other than an attentive reading of the texts?

Does part of what "sacred" means have to do with putting something outside of rational intelligibility? Does it entail a kind of extraordinary rendition that binds, sacrifices, the sacred entity to inscrutable modes of capture, transport, protocol and control?

There seems little room for gradation when it comes to the sacred.

Dissent does not dissent from marketing format

Democracy Now offered a worthwhile segment today of War Made Easy, Norman Solomon's dissection of USian war stupidity, over the last half-century.

The portions broadcast offered a range of strategic media manipulation, ranging from the explicit to the implicit (a new set design for the "war room" to make the Pentagoons look cool), etc.

It ought to be getting a little clearer to Harry Hummer and Suzie Sixpack that, across the mediascapes of radio, cable, newspapers, magazines, NASCAR events, Yellow Ribbon Magnet Manufacturers, War Marketeers of all stripes, etc., which are now their only eyes and ears, a scandal is constantly, nakedly recurring: the breaking of knowledge by power, the control of access to "intellectual property," that fake capitalist category, and the manipulation of phony psycho-public platforms as staging areas for simulations of critical assent.

So it was a bit dismaying to find so little shared substance of War Made Easy on the site created for it, which seems cast in the tired blurb 'n sell mold.

How come it hasn't been possible to put up a few clips from the documentary, a youtubation or two (where Solomon is already under attack), and a chapter from the book, a richer faq, etc. along with the pointers to where to buy the DVD?

the tres amigos.

Mute the Press

It's a little difficult to tell through a search of the New York Times whether it has actually covered certain stories or not. Ok, more than a little difficult, it's totally impossible. Insert your search term and retrieve however many links to "free previews" of stories going back a ways. Since the previews are snips containing the search term, there's often no way to say for sure that the story is actually centered on someone, or just mentions them in passing.

It might be worthwhile to ask how it can be that the News Organ that pretends for all the world to be the authoritative newspaper of record on all newsworthy things can simultaneously withhold from public view whether it even is or is not a source for stories that one might wish to research.

I happened to be trying to see whether the Times has ever done a story about Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. You can do the search yourself, and let me know if you have any better luck. She's mentioned in passing, dissed in a film review, sort of a tangent quote here and there. But her feat of becoming a serious and respected conveyor of news by quilting together hundreds of small, local media to build what's essentially a grassroots national alternative radio and television network -- a story that would seem, in the information age, at least as relevant as the release of a new DVD of Mario Bava films, this story seems to remain to be reported by the Mother of all NewsFitToPrint.

I was checking on whether the Times had gotten around to Goodman after looking at and participating in this thread regarding, in part, the quality of information, the level of public discourse, in the US these days, in light of a pointer there to Umberto Eco's remarks on the nature of Fascism, "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt."

The question being, how a fifth rate anything like Mr. Geo. W. Bush could talk his way not just into the most powerful position on Earth, but then further wartalk his way right up into his own arse with the most reductive view of reality, the most puerile ideas about life, politics, and co-existence, the most dumbed-down, porcine representations of others and evil and freedumb etc. ever offered to the USian political arena -- clusters of idiotic speech and venal nonthought that would not pass muster in a 5th grade classroom in Boston in 1828. I mean, it makes one wonder.

Wonder, e.g., what illumination was not offered by mainstream media. Yes, it's a blogger's duty to wonder that. But what specifically seemed wonderful is that so many instances of lucidity present themselves, a spectrum of informed visions of life and reality that just don't seem to make it into public consciousness.

When was the last time Naomi Klein, eg, was invited on the nightly news to ask,

When you can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is your peace incentive? Democracy Now

(via here)

Klein, Goodman, and a great many others are spectral nonentities, Amurhikan Non-idols. Unsurvivables. They never got to the island in the first place. Gesturing vainly under the giant Mute Button we call Secure Corporate USian Media, or SCUM.

The Times cannot countenance Goodman. Or, it can, but it would then have to make up stuff about why its representation of the world seems so vacuous by comparison. Instead of taking an honest journalistic position that might say, "this journalist's critique is one we should emulate," it's so much easier to just hit mute, and kill any search utility while you're at it.