----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
- Woke up insomiac, groggy. You write,
"... yes, I put that badly, sorry. What I meant was the fabrication by
totalitarian orders of an atmosphere where the truth is a consensual lie
and the difference between the two is in the (potential) force applied:
I'll say it is so, as long as it what 'most' people agree, despite
knowing, with 'most' people, it is a lie popularised by the regime... and
if tomorrow it changes, with 'most' people, with whom I happen to agree, I
will say yesterday's truth was a lie. But here the force that is applied
is a kind of consensus from which has been removed every impurity, in the
evidence of force, in the evidence of any evidence, of fingerprints or any
human contact, of it having been manipulated, or wrongdoing, ... it is as
clean as data, clean as an algorithm. (And here perhaps enters
<<empyre's>> other theme, of a mediated digital culture, of one being
maintainable or conceivable.)
"The question of what Alan calls "critique-in-opposition" is of an
immanent critique: the truth (of the opposition) will not puncture the
bubble (of the consensus) but is a part of its swirling phantasmagoria."
-- I think what you describe is much more a totality than exists on the
ground here. Totality, totalization. The consensus for one thing isn't a
consensus; the swirling phantasmagoria (great phrase!) isn't such outside
of Trump and his comrades literally in arms. What goes on, at least in RI
and what I've seen elsewhere in the U.S., are very specific local actions
that produce results - that's a new thing here. What's popularized one way
or another by the 'regime' has been constantly falling apart, even among
Trump's followers; an example is the growing realization among them that
healthcare may be disappearing, and there's pushback of all sorts. The
difference between T and totalitarianism is that the latter is program-
matic (Arendt talks about that), within core beliefs and unification - the
most extreme example for me being Kim Il Sung's juche idea, that the head
of the state does the thinking and planning for the state, just as the
head of an organism contains the brain. But that's not what's happening
here; it may well turn fascist (we worry about T calling out the militia
sooner or later, starting a war, etc.), but at the moment it's a scatter-
ing of brutal laws and actions by a government which continually displaces
itself - opposed by localizations, and all of this an over-ture so to
speak covering racist / religious / you name it / attacks of all sorts jut
beneath the surface.
Something reminds me of the French resistance, which romanticized itself,
found itself as resistance, acted piecemeal, and so forth. Like a lot of
other resistances, and micro-cultures grow out of these - literatures, and
here in the U.S. there are artworlds responding in all sorts of ways (for
example the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little which just came out).
You say above "But here the force that is applied is a kind of consensus
from which has been removed every impurity, in the evidence of force, in
the evidence of any evidence, of fingerprints or any human contact, of it
having been manipulated, or wrongdoing, ... it is as clean as data, clean
as an algorithm." - which is a brilliant description, but the issue is
this I think - that in fact all that is occurring _is_ impurity, and the
incompetence of the regime finds this intolerable. Impurity: in women, in
Islam, in any culture other than that of white christian - and impurity in
the decohering of resistance resulting in continuous reorganization.
- Which again is why the military option or other forms of violence
(immigration agent invasions of neighborhoods, initiating nuclear testing
again, and so forth) are so utterly dangerous...
Thank you so much for this!, Alan
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