Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
Recent
Stories
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
6, 2003
Living in Death's
Dream Kingdom
The
Pyschotic Core of Capitalist Ideology
By WALTER A. DAVIS
Here are ten quick lessons toward developing a
concept of ideology adequate to our historical situation. (1)
In contrast to those who would separate ideology (as a product
of society) and psychology (as a product of the family), each
lesson shows a way in which ideology is psychology and depends
on psychological principles for its realization. We can't understand-and
resist-the working of capitalist ideology until we understand
the psychological foundations. I hasten to add, however, that
while the categories I use here are psychoanalytic, one of the
main purposes of the essay is to expose the bankruptcy of American
psychoanalysis, the end-result of the goal that has shaped its
history: to become the social engineer of the adaptation of the
ego to the system.
(1) Lesson One.
"The occupation of Iraq will be an enormous success because
once free of their shackles the Iraqui people will embrace us
as their liberators." "Democracy in Iraq will be a
model for the spread of democratic governments throughout the
Middle East." "Our actions in Iraq will bring a solution
to the Palestinian problem." Etc. The true significance
of such beliefs is that those who put them forth actually believe
them. They are not the cynical, deceptive cover for something
else, but true articles of faith. Capitalist ideology isn't
false consciousness that can be corrected by reality testing.
It's a deliberate self-deception of a delusional order. Capitalist
 ideology is the fantasy or
fantasmatic consciousness that is imposed on history
so that everything beyond control will submit to the force
of beliefs that cannot be challenged, modified, or reflected
upon. Those who create ideology are not master deceivers,
they are true believers. Fantasies are essential to ideology
because they provide the frame that is imposed upon historical
events to deliver us from traumatic realities. As Marx taught,
ideology renders history unknowable. What he didn't see is what
Freud enables us to add: it does so for psychological reasons.
(2)
This understanding of ideology, like
the nine that follow, increase and transform our task. There
is not some correct, reasonable consciousness behind ideology
to which we can appeal in order to get rid of ideological distortions,
come to our senses, and change our policies. No such consciousness
is possible. The fantasmatic distortions are essential to the
maintenance of the capitalist system. Without them it implodes.
(2) Lesson Two. Ground-zero.
As many of you know this term was coined in 1945 in Alamogordo,
New Mexico, to identify the epicenter where the First Atomic
Bomb was detonated. It was then used to locate the same point
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki so that we could measure with precision
the force of the Bomb and gauge its effects. The appropriation
of this term to refer to the site of what was the World Trade
Center is thus far from innocent. I hasten to point out what
ground-zero has not been allowed to signify: the ability through
suffering a trauma to learn painful lessons about our own past
and thereby to achieve solidarity with all victims of atrocity
and terrorism through the attainment of a new maturity bound
to restraint and the duties of world citizenship: the pursuit
of justice through international law, through the presentation
of carefully gathered evidence to the United Nations and the
World Court. As we all know, none of this happened. It could
not because of the psychological mechanism that informs the response
of capitalist ideology to history. That mechanism is inversion
or the reversal of meaning. To illustrate in terms of
ground-zero. Hiroshima was the first act of global terrorism.
That is its historical truth. But that truth must be again
exorcised by inversion. Thus ground-zero is deployed to identify
us as the victims of a terrorism we claim is unprecedented and
that we demand the world acknowledge as such. The stage is thus
set for employing the primitive psychotic defense mechanisms
of evacuation and projective identification to
cleanse and renew ourselves through the acts of "heroic"
aggression we take in Afghanistan, Iraq, and any other country
we label a haven of terrorism. Surplus aggression thereby
eradicates an "evil" that has been placed totally outside
ourselves. The inversion is completed in a way that let's us
once again practice our own form of global terrorism while calling
it the opposite.
Such are the primary psychological mechanisms
whereby ideology responds to traumatic events. Traumatic events
reawaken buried historical traumas, things long forgotten or
persistently denied. They thereby make possible a non-ideological
knowledge of the past. That possibility mandates for ideology
the assertion of the only connection it allows between past,
present, and future. Ideology takes the past and inverts its
meaning so that it can repeat again what it did before. Repetition
compulsion informs not just the inability to understand history
but the assurance that things will always get worse. History
doesn't repeat itself as farce; it repeats itself as expanded
aggression.
(3) Lesson Three. Instead of declaring war on Al Qaeda, President
Bush declared war on Terrorism. And that glorious battle had
to come cloaked in theological terms fitted to the projection
of an omnipotent desire which requires global actions to confirm
an infantile self-conception. Through a battle of good against
evil, all inner disorders are placed outside us. Historical
action thereby becomes the reaffirmation of an ahistorical essence.
Action must confer an absolute omnipotent status upon us by constituting
the next step in a progress toward the end of history. Being
unable to learn from history and striving to bring about the
end of history --recall here the post cold-war boast of Fukuyama
and others-are functions of the same underlying psychotic desire,
which shapes both policy studies and military action. The psychotic
hatred of reality requires the extinction of otherness. Putting
an end to history is the psychotic project par excellance.
This understanding of ideology transforms our task. Marx spoke
of liberating the historical, rational kernel from the mystical
shell of the Hegelian dialectic. For us, at a later stage of
that history, a new task beckons: to liberate the psychotic
kernel from the fantasmatic shell.
Ideology is grounded in necessities far
deeper than economic self-interest or popular beliefs and prejudices.
Such beliefs maintain their hold only because they serve a
deeper necessity. The understanding of Inversion enables
us get at that lower layer. Inversion occurs when we
turn something upside down or inside out in order to deny an
impossible condition. That condition, I suggest, is the psychotic
anxiety that is at the center of American society. Fantasms
provide for ideology the frame that makes reality possible because
fantasies are acts of magical reasoning that give evacuation
and projective identification a way to fashion for itself the
omnipotence that is the signpost of psychosis. That psychotic
demand is the true reason why Empire is the destiny we now brazenly
announce to an incredulous world.
(4) Lesson Four.
John Poindexter (of earlier Reagan Iran-Contra fame) was, until
recently, the head of TIAP, the Terrorist Information Awareness
Program of DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
where he set in motion the since cancelled PAM, the Policy Analysis
Market, where anyone who wants could bet money on the date for
events such as the following: the death of Saddam Hussein, the
next major terrorist attack in the U.S., the discovery of the
WMD in Iraq, the assassination of Yasser Arafat, etc.. The official
rationale: the Defense Department could thereby get "information"
providing a reliable index of future events. Sybil the Soothsayer
dressed out in computer garb. The Senatorial outcry that nixed
the project (temporarily) was nothing to the hue and cry that
then went up within the intelligence community at this affront
to the technological imperative. Once again short-sighted politicians
deprived us of "a way of capturing people's collective
wisdom" and binding it to "a tool with a strong
history of accurately predicting future events. Also, fantasmatically,
a chance opportunity to tap into terrorist's plans since a primary
rationale behind the proposal backed, supposedly, by scientific
data about insider trading on the stock of American Airlines
and United in the days before 9-11-is that terrorists
are like us and can't resist the temptation to cash in on their
actions. As apologists for Pam indignantly note, similar computer
wagering systems correctly picked 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees
in the eight biggest categories last year and have shown scientifically
that the price of orange juice is an accurate predicter of the
weather in Florida! (3) The speciousness of this argument
isn't irrelevant; it's the point. For what PAM offers is the
satisfaction of the cardinal imperative of capitalist ideology:
(1) a fetishization and worship of the market as the privileged
space for the projection of fantasmatic fears and desires. In
the age of hyperreality and simulation, predicting and producing
the future are inseparable. Such is the faith that informs our
simultaneous worship of technology and the market.
Freud saw religion as collective neurosis.
In PAM technology creates for capitalist ideology a sacred
space. For the deepest fantasy fueling this thing --the shared
dream of the stock broker and the Department of Homeland Security--is
the dream of omniscience, the belief that we can know and control
the future before it happens. All we have to do is provide a
space to which all psyches will be drawn as to a gigantic magnet,
addicted to what market capitalism promises, the simultaneity
of wealth, knowledge, and power. There is, indeed, something
autoerotic about the whole scheme. The assumption is that capitalism
has already conquered. Terrorists are, finally, just like us.
They too can't resist the market. From which follows, however,
the paranoid suspicion that the fantasy necessarily generates.
Suppose terrorists make bets to deliberately put us off their
tracks? Well, the Market has long taught us how to stay one
step ahead. After all, we rule the world because we play this
game better than anyone else. And thus we find in the further
reaches of PAM the realization, for our time, of MAD and its
dream of perfecting the logic of deterrence. "I.e., if
the Russians think we'll send our nukes if they send theirs then
they won't and so we can, etc." PAM is not a crackpot scheme,
it is necessary madness, a madness that reveals the nature of
the system, the kind of thing it must produce to satisfy both
libidinal and paranoid imperatives.
Those who know the work of Thomas Pynchon
can see why such examples prove that he (not Marx) is our Vergil
who provides in Gravity's Rainbow a model for ideological
inquiry. Pynchon's basic insight is that the most extreme, bizarre
acts and fantasies reveal in the guise of a desperate pseudo-rationality
the madness and irrationality that informs the system as a whole.
Texts such as PAM are privileged objects of ideological
critique because they underlying psychosis moving with obsessional
insistence to what will finally be a condition of pure noise,
information cancelling itself as it grows skyward in pure worship
of itself. As Poindexter's example shows, the great benefit
of "Pynchonian" ideological analysis is that it enables
us to put an end to the base-superstructure concept of ideology
which has so often had the deleterious effect of isolating then
deifying hard-headed economic analysis while confining everything
else to superstructural insignificance. But as PAM illustrates,
the economic and the fantasmatic are inseparable components of
a system that is, of necessity, fantastically fantasmatic. That
is why Cheney and the others can whisper to one another, in one
and the same breath "that it's about the Oil, stupid,"
and that "capitalism will bring the blessing of progress
and freedom to the entire world in the final triumph of good
over evil."
(5) Lesson Five.
Omnipotent desire begets paranoia. Or, to put it in political
terms, global terrorism requires domestic terrorism. That
is why the First Patriot Act begets the second and will no doubt
beget the third. Why if you smoke pot you support terrorism and
if you criticize Bush's policies you give aid and comfort to
the "enemy." Etc. Why Roe v. Wade must be dismantled
and gay marriage made a primary campaign issue, all the better
to control the knee-jerks of docile subjects compelled to defeat
those who support the cancer eating away at our moral fabric.
The essential drive of ideology is to extinguish everything
that poses the threat of otherness, everything that brings anxiety
to a mind like Ashcroft's by raising the spectre of citizens
who are anything but obedient, respectful-- and afraid. Ideology
is inherently fascistic and surveillance is its priest. The
inherent goal of ideology is to totalize the operations needed
to give it omnipotent control over all possible contingencies.
History only makes sense when projected on the inner screen of
psychotic anxieties. Ideology doesn't blind us to history.
It rejects history before the fact by projecting a future that
it insists must come to pass.
(6) Lesson Six. We thus attain the only ideologically adequate
definition of capitalism-a definition which dances simultaneously
to economic and psychological imperatives. Capitalism is the
reduction of all human relations to the profit motive in an expansionism
that is necessarily global and must eliminate everything opposed
to its logic. Subjects who internalize capitalism thus of necessity
desire " to have all good things" in a purely additive
synthesis, a logic of accumulation that is infantile since it
can tolerate no contradictions or limitations. Annexation is
the only operation. But annexation to what? To a psychic economy
that takes as its primary task the elimination of everything
within the "self" that does not conform to the logic
of capitalism. Through the perfection of that operation one attains
the only goal that has value: that blissful state of total affirmation
of a subject obsessed of necessity with sign-exchange value-with
obtaining what Rilke termed "money's genitals," the
objects one surrounds oneself with in order to satisfy the narcissistic
fixation and conceal the narcissistic void that capitalism necessarily
produces. A "self" that has reduced itself to the
condition of a thing must perforce obsessively proclaim, through
the possession of things, a phantom identity. Which is why capitalism
produces as the primary form of social interaction the age of
Happy Talk - the compulsive and compulsory reassurance that
one is, indeed, the realization of all human values and has
the proof: one "feels good about oneself" and is unwilling
and eventually unable to feel any other way.
(7) Lesson Seven. Which brings us to the role in ideology
of what should have been its primary critic. My effort has been
to bring psychoanalytic categories to bear on the analysis of
ideology, to reclaim all that is dangerous and radical in Freud's
legacy in order to combat what has happened to psychoanalysis
in America. For in America psychoanalysis is merely the "identity
wing" of the ideological project, the wing that performs
perhaps the most important function by creating subjects bound
to the social system as the very condition of mental health and
ego identity. Playing that role has been the through-line of
psychoanalytic ego psychology from Heinz Hartmann's fetishization
of adaptation to the current full blooming of that project:
the creation, as therapeutic ideal, of "selves" that
are so well-adapted to the system that anything troubling or
traumatic has but one meaning and serves but one purpose: an
occasion to prove that those who have achieved a strong, stable
ego-identity always move from and to the reaffirmation
of all the ideological beliefs and guarantees-and one's identification
with them. Ego psychology is social engineering as ideological
justification. And it works because thanks to the trickle down
effect of such thinking in popular discourse and in the media
we are now bound psychologically as a nation to the cruelest
necessity: the internalization en masse of the structures
of feeling that wed subjects to the system because those
feelings can no longer be questioned or resisted. They must
instead be enacted with the rigidity and regularity of a behavioral
law of stimulus-response. The main feeling, of course, is that
one should never have bad feelings; indeed, that all feelings
labeled "negative" must be shunned. Which is why 9-11
was a trauma that could not be responded to traumatically.
Instead, the trauma had to be "resolved." Good feelings
had to be restored and as quickly as possible. Any response
to events that sustains pain is by definition bad. Faced with
trauma, ego psychology performs what is for capitalism its function-putting
Humpty Dumpty back together again by helping the populace reaffirm
the founding emotional belief: that trauma must always be resolved
through recovery of those positive feelings without which, we
are told, life would be meaningless.
Our task thus entails a deeper, harsher
imperative. To free ourselves from capitalist ideology we must
free ourselves from all the psychological needs and feelings
that have for most of us attained the status of unquestioned
emotional necessities. Tragic self-overcoming and not adaptation
must become the relationship we live to ourselves if we are to
free ourselves from capitalism's monopoly over emotional experience.
(9) Lesson Eight. That monopolization is everywhere, however,
and today has taken control over what should be the primary site
of resistance. I refer to what has happened in the Arts since
9-11. Not just the cancellation here, in Princeton, and elsewhere
of "shows deemed inappropriate at this time" because
they ask us to question when the only thing everyone wants is
the warm bath of positive feelings. But also the proliferation
of works that perform one of the two functions that capitalism
assigns to art: (1) mindless entertainment that relieves us of
our burdens while programming us to desire more mindless entertainment;
and worse, (2) works that falsely resolve the trauma by offering
those structures of feeling that are the aesthetic wing
of ideology. I refer to the general belief that the role of serious
art is to produce a "catharsis" that discharges the
burden of painful feelings and restores us to a "humanity"
that is essentialistic and a-historical. It cannot learn from
history because it has "always already" transcended
it. But what it regards as its superior "Humanism"
really amounts to no more than the emotional buffers it imposes
on events in order to protect and reaffirm the beliefs needed
to deny and contain the posibility of serious, tragic responses
to events. Art as oppositional discourse thus faces a task that
is magnified by the understanding of ideology we've developed.
Art must deracinate every "structure of feeling"
that weds it to the effort to please audiences and restore their
"good feelings." Culture remains oppositional only
if it refuses to compromise its negativity. By that standard,
I would suggest, the Arts have never been in a worse condition
than they are now.
(9) Lesson Nine. On August 6th 2003, as an official "commemoration"
of the 58th anniversary of Hiroshima a top secret meeting was
held at the U.S. Strategic Command Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
Over 150 top U.S. officials and military contractors attended.
Vice President Cheney was reportedly there as was Keith Payne,
the man most often seen as the prototype for Dr. Strangelove.
[It was Payne who in 1980 opined that the U.S. could absorb
losses of 20 million in a nuclear war with Russia and win.] Congressional
staff members and committee staff members were barred from the
meeting. Its primary purpose was to discuss the various candidates
for production as tactical high yield, earth penetrating nuclear
weapons. Such weapons are thought to have many uses, including
(fantastically) the ability to incinerate biological and chemical
weapons. (4)
The search is over. We finally know
where the WMD are-and why they haunt us as something we must
project as "out there somewhere" in Iraqor, as one
bright pundit suggested, already smuggled out and hiding somewhere
else. (The WMD function as Bush and Company's Lacanian objet
a.) For the imagination of nuclear winter there will always
be such conferences where, as in the Poindexter example, contradictions
come together as in the logic of the dream, a logic where desire
cannot be negated and the expression of the deepest unconscious
wish-structure is assured. A spectre is haunting Amerika,
the spectre of Hiroshima. What we did then must be repeated,
if only in fantasy --and (what looks like) diminished form-so
as to again exorcise the disavowed memory of Hiroshima
from our collective psyche. Nuclear fear swept America after
1945 as our bad conscience, the recognition that what we'd done
could be done to us. Fear is the return of the projections,
which can only be evacuated again by an even greater projection
of the founding act. Thus the hydrogen bomb. Star wars. And for
the 21st century and a new historical situation -- the age of
Empire or state terrorism and counterterrorism-- the production
of new tactical nuclear weapons as both usable and justifiable.
At this extreme, historical irony and dark intentionality meet.
Our actions in Iraq proliferated the nuclear threat by teaching
all nations (North Korea, Iran) that the only way to deter
American aggression is by getting the Bomb. What the conference
in Omaha enables us to intimate about the future squares with
what it took fifty years to establish as the true reasons why
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated so strong was the ideological
pull of the official "humanitarian" explanation that
we did it "to end the war and save countless lives."
We did it, on the contrary, for four motives: (1)to avenge
Pearl Harbor (a terrorist attack); (2)to justify the amount of
Money spent developing the Bomb (3)to create a laboratory where
our scientific, medical, and military personnel could study the
affects of the bomb, and (4) to "shock and awe" the
Russians with this opening Salvo in the Cold War. Those motives
remain at the core of our policy toward the world. Once again
history does not repeat itself as farce; it repeats itself as
psychotic necessity.
(10) Lesson Ten.
There is a deeper, psychological reason why our leaders must
find ways to "commemorate" Hiroshima. Psychosis is
the attempt to attain certainty through the manic triad-triumph,
contempt, and dismissal. Thereby the Other is made the object
of an aggression that obliterates all humanistic and ethical
restraints. Narcissistic grandosity is thereby unleashed wedded
to the ultimate inversion: Thanatos or Death has been
eroticized and provides the one and only, supreme and irresistible
libidnal pleasure--the pleasure of unleashing a destructiveness
that voids all inner tensions, putting an end to all doubts
and fears. Fortuitously, the same day as the Omaha conference
Studs Terkel interviewed Paul Tibbetts, the man who dropped the
first Bomb and who has proudly proclaimed on countless occasions
that he's never felt a moments regret. To him is thus reserved
what was in Omaha also the last word. Studs Terkel: "One
last thing, when you hear people say, 'Let's nukie 'em,"
"Let's nuke these people," what do you think?"
Tibbets: "Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd
wipe "em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the
same timeThat's their tough luck for being there." (5)
The eroticization of Death is the through-line
of recent American history and the key to understanding the true
goal of capitalist ideology-the creation of a historical situation
in which all human relations have become relations among things.
To know the future mandated by that imperative the best text
remains these lines from a poem Robert Lowell wrote in 1967,
lines with an even greater resonance today.
Pity the planet, all joy gone
From this sweet volcanic cone
Peace to our children when they fall
In small war on the heels of small
War-until the end of time
To police the earth, a ghost
Orbiting forever lost
In our monotonous sublime (6)
Monotonous because
it is the repetition compulsion of those unable to react to history
in any other way. Sublime because it evacuates all inner
anxiety by creating the only object that can fill such beings
with wonder: the scorched earths in which they create the mirror
image, the objective correlative of their own inner condition.
And so, to recap, here are ten definitions
of ideology that reveal our historical situation.
(1) Ideology isn't false consciousness.
It's fantasmatic consciousness-the creation of illusions and
self-delusions.
(2) Ideology isn't based on false ideas.
It's based on the necessity of employing primitive psychotic
defense mechanisms to exorcise traumatic events.
(3) Ideology derives from the psychotic
register of the psyche and performs the three operations needed
to carry out the inversion that defines psychosis:
i.e., projective identification, evacuation, surplus aggression
as the means whereby one locates one's inner disorder in an external
object so that by attacking and annihilating it one can overcome
what one cannot face about oneself.
(4) The inherent logic of ideology is
the creation of policies and projects in which the underlying
irrationality takes the form of pseudo-rational ideas. Such
policies are surreal texts that must be read as pure wish fulfillments
straight from the ideological Unconscious, that register at the
heart of ideology that knows no no and must therefore project
a dream-state in which all contradictions are annulled and all
desires fulfilled.
(5) Ideology is driven by an obsessional
need to totalize the omnipotent desire that drives it. That
effort is informed by the contradiction that defines obsessionalism-the
discovery of new uncertainties and thus the repetition of a
project that can only rest with "the end of history."
Or, to put it in slightly different terms, ideology is necessarily
paranoid.
(6) Capitalism is made
fool-proof through the ideological fusion of economic and psychological
imperatives. The result is a mass subject in thrall to collective
fantasms, a subject whose inwardness mirrors the void at the
center of the system. The pursuit of narcissistic "identity"
and the fetishization of commodities are inseparable, indistinguishable
processes
(7) Psychology is the capstone
of the ideological process. It's function is social engineering,
the production of the worst form of quiet desperation, that of
noisy affirmation from docile subjects eternally wedded to the
Hosannah that deprives them of any inwardness.
(9) Ideology is the means by which the
sources of resistance are already contained, rendered impossible
by "structures of feeling" that control how traumatic
events are responded to by artist's dedicated to their social
function and by a populace who can only respond with pleasure
to those things which take away their suffering, and with it
the possibility of awareness. Far from incidental, this definition
may identify the most important ideological formation, the one
that holds the entire structure in place, by determining what
we must feel-and what we cannot. Ideology is inherently behaviorist.
It's effort is to create stimulus-response mechanisms that bind
subjects to it the way Pavlov's dogs salivated to the bell.
(10) Ideology is the assurance that the
founding psychosis will thrive, renewed as the blank check on
which the entire edifice draws for its sustenance. It is a circle
that cannot be broken into, a circle that contains experience
and history in the repetition of the same.
In view of such a situation the task
of resistance is clear. We must continue to constitute the trauma
of 9-11 and refuse any and all attempts to dissolve it. This
is the only response that seizes trauma not as an occasion to
prove once again that ideology blinds us to history; but as
an opportunity to show that sustaining trauma is the act that
enables us to know history for the first time by apprehending--
as they go into operation-- the psychological mechanisms whereby
it is denied. This epistemological stance speaks, however, to
a deeper imperative. It is the only basis for an ethic
that maintains solidarity with the victims. As Walter Benjamin
taught, the dead remain in danger. Not just of being appropriated
by the monsters who claim to act in their name, but by us whenever
we sacrifice our solidarity with the dead in order to satisfy
our emotional needs. In speaking for this ethic, however, I can
only bow in respectful silence to those who already know it
and are living it-those who have come here so that their dead
will not have died in vain but will find a fitting memorial in
the efforts we make to take up what has become our task: to
free ourselves from everything that binds us to capitalist ideology
so that the courses of action we propose won't rest on assumptions
that bind us to the ideology that we must overcome.
Walter A. Davis
is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He
is the author of Deracination:
Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative and The
Holocaust Memorial: a play about Hiroshima. He can be reached
at: davis.65@osu.edu.
ENDNOTES:
(1) This essay attempts to update and
develop my earlier essay that appeared in Counterpunch
(January 6, 2003) titled Death's
Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11. Both essays
are based theoretically on my recent book Deracination:Historicity,
Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY P, 2001).
(2) It is worth formulating briefly here
the main difference between the theory of ideology I am developing
and the one worked out by Slavoj Zizek. Both focus on the fantasmatic
and both are based on radical appropriations of what is dangerous
and unsettling in psychoanalysis. Zizek's focus on enjoyment-on
the commandment to enjoy as the heart of late capitalism-stems
from his insistence on maintaining an oedipal problematic: prohibition
no longer works; the law of the father can only maintain itself
today through the commandment to enjoy. There is much to be
said for the insights this perspective provides. It's weakness
however-and it can be shown that this weakness is an a priori
necessity-lies in the inability of the oedipal paradigm to comprehend
the psychotic drive that shapes the social whole. Zizek admits
as much in The Ticklish Subject:
The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso,1999),
pp.249-250 where he denies that there is a psychotic dimension
to American culture. This essay-and Deracination-are an
attempt to correct that view.
(3) See Boston Herald, August
4,2003, Technology section; Wired News, July 30,2003,
Business section; and New York Times, August 3, 2003,
"Week in Review."
(4) See Democracy Now, August 5, 2003.
(5) Studs Terkel, The Guardian.
August 5, 2002. For this and related links on the Guardian Unlimited
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk.
(6) Robert Lowell, "Waking Early
Sunday Morning," Near the Ocean (1967).
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