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The Reality Wars: The Paranoid Style in American Public Culture

[03.2010]

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The Reality Wars: The Paranoid Style in American Public Culture

  


Let me start off by qualifying my remarks on ?public culture? by indicating that the ?culture? I mean is less the supposedly autonomous field of art than the contingent and pervasive field of sociological and anthropological ?culture,? and that it is the ?public,? and the dubious character of the ?public? that I question most. What is at stake today for the care and quality of ?Publicity? has a lot to do with culture, and with culture wars, but it?s gotten weirder than that, and it?s time to measure the depths of the weirdness. 
   

A Culture War includes jihads against giant Buddhas and Mapplethorpses but is mostly a war between the partisans of two notions of what Public even means the social democratic association with the non-corporate commonwealth, and the Private-civic association with the private realm independent of State control. I have to simplify things greatly here for time, sake and it is true the many on the Private-Civic side harbor fantasies of total state control so long as it jibes with their revisionist comprehension of Fundamentalist Christianity,  but all that being said, today, the culture wars have evolved into something more confounding yet: the Reality Wars. 
   

Political conflict in 2010 in the USA is driven as much by conflict over the facticity of Reality itself as the cultural connotations of that content. And because our post-Crash predicament may be characterized not only bifurcating culture wars but by Wars over the nature of the Real itself. We?ve moved to some extent from acrimony over the cultures of prestige, status, access, sacrality, profanation and so on to one in which all those fights take place over what is even happening at all. Politics is ontological (again?)

    Black Last week I was standing in front of the Chancellor?s office, in that courtyard area, with many colleagues concerned to see that the events of the last weeks would be cause for important change on the campus. The mood was serious and pensive. Speakers were impassioned and swift to locate the weeks events into broader histories of oppression and resistance. In their words decades and decades of struggle were telescoping into this event and potential event. There was, as Badiou would say, a fidelity in formation there.  I left early to rejoin my family and in doing so came upon another gathering just around the corner on the grass near the student union building. There hundreds of smiling, relaxed college kids add kettle corn and sipped beer, laughing, lounging on the grass in the cold California sun. Their mood was calm and easy. They were clearly not refusing fidelity to the other event. These kettlecorn eaters are not an army of cynics taunting the BSU with their blithe leisure, they are living on a different planet, that happens to occupy the same location with other planets.
   

And that?s it. Is the condition like that described by Baudrillard in the Perfect Crime that reality itself has been stolen and evacuated from the scene leaving all of us to our private illusions, or is the opposite more true, that in the era of 7 billion channel social media networks allowing each of us to live only in the reality of our choosing, is there instead a ungovernable proliferation of realities? Not zero reality but 7 billion of them? Perhaps it ends up being the same thing.     
   

The Reality Wars extend to the contentious issues of the day. A significant percentage of the USA (they are part of the public by any definition) do not believe evolution is real. A recent poll indicated that more Americans believe in Guardian Angels than anthropogenic climate change. Something like one-third (the polls differ) of Republicans believe the President was born in Africa  and is a secret Muslim intent on the deliberate destruction of the country. One-third of the roughly 40% of Americans who self-identify as Republicans. That works out to about 40 million people. 
   

Climate change denialism is the reality war of the moment, and given the stakes, one that cannot be lost. It is right for an open-source society for every scientific finding and every presupposition to be challenged and re-challenged, that is how public science should work. But obviously this denialism is not about trying to out-rigor the IPCC. The policy ramifications of climate change are intolerable to libertarians and conservatives and tolerable to liberals and radicals and so we take our sides around the facts as if they were the 50 yard line of some indeterminate spectator sport. These disputes are culturally influenced, and the denialists are wrong on the policy debate, but primary, like Creationists, they are factually wrong, not just politically wrong. Just false. This is either exactly a indirect reverberation of the Science Wars of the 1990?s or their precise opposite. I?m not sure.


Nevertheless, this is our public culture town hall. How many of you ventured to the Town Hall Healthcare this summer? I went to one in Spring Valley where the Town Hallers, they were not yet the Tea Party, confronted Susan Davis with their litany of conspiracy theories and incoherent complaints. This was my introduction to San Diego, but I wanted to go and meet and talk to these people. This infamous San Diego right-wing I?ve heard so much about (you?ll recall that as California almost split in two over the Civil War, S.D strongly sided with the Confederacy and that?s plans were for the harbor to be the CSA?s pacific interface).  I?ll save you all the anecdotes but one particular exchange with a guy with unblinking eyes and a red, white and blue camouflage baseball cap with the emblem of his pool-cleaning business above the brim, he concluded after our back and forth that ?well, you have your facts and I have mine.? In other words, facts are not facts but rhetorical possessions. You believe that there are no death panels and he does, and it is finally immaterial whether or there are ?in reality? any death panels because he feels the right to his facts about these matters. To tell him otherwise like telling a Catholic that it?s just a cracker. And this is the thing, the logics of religion have not disappeared they have infused every fabric of public life. The rote ritual of repetition is built into our media technologies, and, especially for internet culture, the privacy of belief dominates the form and content of political public-ness. 
   

Paraphrasing our friend, Boris Groys, if in the past the personal was shown to be political, today the political is personal. (quote from Groys here) Even further, politics is solipsism, and publics are self-assigning fictions. the political is not arena of antagonism over the zero-sum of power it is a theater of doctrinal projection: this is the Reality Wars as applied to Public Culture.


Market researchers and mainstream urbanists talk about the Big Sort, whereby cultural and politically like-minded people take advantage of post-industrial mobility to organize themselves into culturally homogenous archipelagos : Celebration, Florida, the Castro District, Salt Lake City, Cobb County, Georgia, Williamsburg, Carlsbad, CA. re-enforced by political gerrymandering. 
   

Now as well we also have the Cognitive Sort, whereby the condition of participation to listen to only what you want to hear, seeing what you want to see, hearing what you want to hear: 100 trillion websites does not mean cultural omnivorousness and ease of access to exotic and dissenting perspectives, bringing forth a new digital cosmopolitanism, it means the capacity to formulate an 24/7/365 reality effect with a rigorously unbroken 360 degree thematic, like a restaurant at DisneyWorld, the ambient brand modeling of the Thematics of Everyday Life. This ubiquitous solipsism is connected to the eclipse of anamnesis  that Google brings: simultaneously erasing the need for the memory (bodily memory, historical memory, and even cognitive and technical memory) AND erasing through the objective accumulation of digital traces the possibility of forgetting, anything: all is just a comprehensive present tense,  including the very very old, a condition similar to what others call our condition of atemporality.


The relationship between politics and creative projection as well as delusional projection is of course despite what I?ve said not a new phenomena. It is another name for Utopia, and the public culture of the contemporary Right in the USA is nothing if not utopian (and dystopian).. Glenn Beck?s speech to CPAC which mixes Pentecostal original sin theory with 12 Step narcissism to conclude that Liberal progress, providing the establishment of material well-being denies humanity its rightful assignment of self-overcoming, forever repeating the fall from Eden within every biography, forever repeating the rise from the literal abjection of destitution to basic sustenance over and again, everyone starting at theYear Zero of civilization on their own.     
   

In the Ontological Politics of the day, where first principle conflict is over what is reality at all, every theory is a conspiracy theory.  In this the relation between competing utopias seems based mostly on reaction-compulsion and projection disorders, such as paranoia and narcissism, whereby other models completed less in a direct adversarial form (Schmitt seems a naive) than as content for delusional narrative projections. And so there is something to be gleaned by recognizing the portrait of the left be read in the inversion of the inversion is of the Right?s paranoid reaction-compulsion. In fact it might be said that the version of the Left that the Paranoid Right thinks it is opposing is in some ways better than the one we really have: a UN directed internationalist socialism, reverend illuminati, FEMA camps into which to store rounding up gun owners forcing them to submit to socialist-feminist mind control implants. IF ONLY it were so!!!. Take Glenn Beck?s obsession with the Invisible Committee?s The Coming Insurrection, now far, and away the best-seller Semiotexte has ever had, and certainly their own title that is read primarily by right-wingers. They read it for prurient glee, to wallow in what they think the despicable Left is up to (like I might tune into Michael Savage just to make stomach ache or read all the blog comments about BANG lab TBT: the soft masochism of this symmetry).The Coming Insurrection represents BOTH their fantasy left -european, nihilist, terroristic, globalist, aligned with violent muslim youth, writing in fancy theory speak, etc.-- and the inverted projective fantasy right wing they wish they could be. They project their own wishes for violent upheaval onto another left which they identify both as Schmittian enemy and as mirror-image ego-ideal. And in that wishful inverted identification with the Other, remember that Freud linked Paranoia with this sort of narcissistic reaction-formation but also with repressed homosexual fantasies, which should help us to see Glenn Beck in a different light.


So what is the best frame to organize these bits and pieces of broken utopias and dystopias? Are the reality wars what comes after public culture, are they in fact a distinct or indistinct culture of the public? What are they good for when we are drowning in utopias, conspiracies, catastrophes and decrepitude. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe Buck-Morss, makes the positive case for the function of utopian fragments. She invokes the Benjaminian concept of the "dreamworld" to posit another use of this abundance of unused image-artifacts  and the utopian mental state inextricably linked to the re-enchantment of the world. She writes that the ?idea is that if these dreamworlds can be redeemed from the structures of power that have seized control of them, then the dialectic of History may be put into motion once more.? Which would we suppose put is well back on track for the final exceptional cash-in-all-chips-at-once Benjaminian messianic revolutionary climax, that puts us perhaps closer to the hegemony of populist eschatology of our our moment than is exactly helpful. At the same time,  the partial, heterological, minor chord, post-structuralist tactics of infinitely refracting difference seem quaintly passive, self-regarding and disengaged from the rough-and-tumble of actually making, designing whatever world does come next and enforcing that design, with law or other means that have the force of law, such as architecture, from that which would have things otherwise, and  which let?s them be the world and not just inscriptions on the world. 
  

We can hope that for the cultures of the publics to come, and for their cosmopolitan qualities or even their lack thereof, that they also will have far less to do with the symmetrical psychodramatic formulations of american left and right as we know them. Further one hopes that they people in general are only one part of how this public understands itself: humans among non-humans: codes, fleshes, flows, geologies, and stable and unstable aggregations of carbon, wind, sunlight and fused nuclei are not only something about which the public may make cultural claims they are the public. This turn, the governance not of humans and the humanities but of material itself, and the post-environmentalist eco-philosophy in the process of formation now,  seems to me may look something like what Deleuze and Guattari called geo-philosophy even if their own version of this took a bit how shall i say ?Oedipal? relationship to the ecologies of capital misrecognized as a single Totality. Future politics is about electrons as much as elections, it is about the production, distribution and equally importantly verification, quantification, visualization and jurisprudence of increasingly rarified energy, from renewable and non-renewable sources. Last month, Google was just approved to sell energy. Not just meter it but sell it. Given that one of the reasons Copenhagen broke down was over the Chinese unwillingness and inability to transparently meter its energy use, and given recent skirmishes over network jurisdiction between Google and China, this is either the best or worst news we could have hoped for, and probably both at the same time. 
   

So the issue for the Left, such as it is and such as it will be, and its role for the Culture of Publics is how culture can in fact make translatability between Publics possible AND how can the left establish its own new forms of governmentality to enforce itself. If the later seems particularly unlikely is this just the well-known seemingly permanent weakness of the Left?s natural facility with techniques of resistance, opposition and protest which do not translate into technologies of power and authority? They are not in and of themselves Design technologies, though obviously they can be employed in concert with them and in this they are not governing technologies. 


If as William  Gibson said, ?the future is here, it just unevenly spread around,? is true, and of course it is, then public culture is about the differential geography of the futurity, and frankly the USA is not necessarily well-aligned within this, not only because of our Think Local, Act Global national character but because, well, we, you and me, just don?t matter as much as we may have at a different times. We may or may not be the ones that we have been waiting for, but we are not the ones the future necessarily requires. 
   

Specifically, the hinge around which 1968 and Soixante-Huitardardisme turned into the forefront of the society of spectacle and not its antithesis might be demonstrated in the tediously commonplace reading of Debord?s iconic Naked City map where the official State map, Plan de Paris, is cut up and rearranged to demonstrate how the city as embodied narrative/ affective landscape is constructed in memory and projection by an individual?s own personal psychogeograpical itinerary. Not that the practice of everyday life is not micropolitcal and contenstational because of course it is, but the version of Situationism made into solipsism, as radical narcissism more than radical politics, and worst as as medium of idiosyncratic difference (the Rosaylyn Deutsche school) is exactly the mechanism by which utopia, fantasy, wish, desire is systematically invested into the cheap thrills of commodity cycles and their self-congratulating simulationist claims to contemporaneity, entertainment, innovation and worst of all self-expression. 
  

If the Left is interested in designing an altermoderntiy and an alterglobalization, and I am not sure that it is other than as branding concepts, then we would do well to remember that democratic means do not produce democratic results, and in fact if we take the classical example of the urban Grid, dumb, fixed, inflexible, immutable protocols (like TCP/IP for that matter, or laws) fixed, non-liquid, strong, structural mechanisms, are, as Zizek has argued in a dozen different ways, how the Left can hope to govern against the dominant globality of our moment, that is hegemonic liquidity. The public cultures of altermodernity (whichever and whosever you like) means not just the discursive politicization of worldly forms, but I think more importantly the deliberate design of political technologies as a concrete material substrate. Parliamentary democracy was a technological invention, as are constitutions, as anything that takes on the force of law whether it is legal or not, such  as building envelopes and supply-chain software.  The force of law going forward emerges from the risky interweaving of multiple and incongruous  jurisdictions operating at multiple scales and multiple temporal rhythms, and this productive governmentality, is for me the lesson to shuttled forward from Foucault, not the paranoid distrust of speaking as and with authority. 
   

Which is to say, as plainly as I can, that the Left should perhaps re-meditate upon the lessons of Marx? critique of bourgeois reformers, and chief among them, to depersonalize the political: where the Care of the Self, the ongoing design of the subject-effect, gives way to the Care of Ubiquity, the on-going design and designation of geography. What environmentalism (and in many ways, identity politics) missed is that not essentially progressive for people take political conflict over the design of public infrastructure as a medium for the expression of psychological trauma. The possible conclusion, for some, such as Adorno, is that the political is personal most when it is has ceased to function as such, and that task to designate and more importantly to enforce a positive  structure of publicity takes priority over of the adventurist rhetorics of false resistance. Either way,  let the equation of the political as the personal, the collapse of the world into the psychological be the right wing?s weakness and not ours. Let them spin off into their own paranoid virtual realities. Meanwhile, we have a planet to govern.

Tags: branding

Published: 03.13.2010

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