Eminem

If any of you haven't seen the new Eminem video
"Mosh" yet, you can watch it online on these websites, among others.

I know some of you aren't into Eminem, or don't care one way or the other. But please, I ask you, as a personal favor to me, unless Eminem seriously makes you want to puke, please go and watch this one, even if his music does nothing for you. Even if Eminem seriously makes you want to puke, I urge to reconsider in this one case.

When you are done go here and vote for it in the TRL countdown. The sooner it hits MTV the more people it can motivate to vote. In the meantime, I'm wearing my black hoodie until election day.

Neo vs. The Neoneocons

This entry started out as a response to never_the_less, who was wondering if this election falls more accurately into the category of "modern" or "postmodern." My immediate reaction was: it's neither, it's the forces of Modernism (John Kerry, neoliberalism, George Soros and his Open Society) battling it out with Postmodernism Gone Bad (the neocons, who have truly earned the postmodern crown with the Agent Smith-like wille zur macht, setting themselves apart from the "reality-based community"--that's us, by the way, and our virtual reality ain't got nothing on theirs. We've got screen handles, they've got Baudrillard).



As never_the_less pointed out, intuitively you'd think the left would be pomo, and the right would be...well, mo...I suppose. But that intuition, while inductively substantiated (although mostly by the points of intersection between academia and politics either in the 1960s or in France), does not apply to the Current World Order. Partially this has to do with why the current administration has nothing to do with the Republican ideology. As Noam Chomsky put it, "these are not conservatives. These are radical reactionaries." And face it, the radicals are going to win on the pomo tip in this day and age.

Furthermore, we need a distinction between the retroneocons and the neoneocons. The first category includes peeps like Francis Fukuyama, who backpedaled from his endorsement of BushCo as the agents of The End of History. Because ultimately, retroneocons are still Modernist. The End of History is, after all, Applied Hegel--applied, perhaps, with vision, but without imagination, to the trajectory of American Empire, but it's still Hegel, it's still a paradigm where history, dialectically plopping along, as it is wont to do, does eventually come to an end. That end being the American Empire, here & now (in theory). Let's call it Hegel with Hubris. People like Henry Kissinger, I would argue, are among the retroneocons, and it's no coincidence that Kissinger and the rest of the Carlyle Group (together with George Soros) split with Halliburton & Co right around the time Putin cashed in his card blanche from soulmate Bush and in an atavistic coup dethroned and imprisoned the largest Russian oil tycoon. Retroneocons have their Neocon Visions, but are grounded in realpolitik, or some circa-millenial version thereof. Basically, empiricism, like politics, makes for strange bedmates, and they, too, are a part of the reality-based community.

The neoneocons are the self-professed "history's actors." As Suskind among others points out, they share both cosmology and praxis with their core base--the Christian Fundamentalists. This absolute faith is rescued from being hubris within the parameters of its own discourse through tautology: how can it be hubris if you are really doing the will of God? While the symptomatic, neoneocon signatures (like Donald Rumsfield's mysterious and almost transcendental "interactions with the press") are good if you need anecdotal case-in-points, it's the overarching metanarrative of Policy that truly illuminates the neoneocon logic. While Linda Hamilton's unconscious carved "no fate but what we make" in Terminator 2, as she tried to prevent a nuclear holocaust from happening, the neoneocon approach is "no reality but what we make." Obviously any attempt to point out the problem with this...uh...philosophy leads to an Onion-style point-counterpoint: Iraq Is Really Fucked-Up vs. Really Is What We Tell You Really Is. Otherwise known as Empiricism vs. Empire.

If anything, this administration has been a case for modernism, at least in the "real world." Tranformation of reality hasn't been particularly succesful, temporary concealment is where it's been at and it's starting to unravel. I hate to keep mining The Matrix for satisfying parallels, but really, if you made a Venn Diageram, you'd have Agent Smith and BushCo in the same sector, with activists trying to shove the red pills down the throats of swing-state undecided voters in the shape of the new Eminem video.

But back to the intuitive/counterintuitive question. The lesson here is the same one I unsuccesfully tried to impart to my ex-boyfriend for years: postmodernism, as a "condition" derived from poststructuralism, is a deconstructive paradigm, and you can't use it proactively, in a project, as a project. It's a critical lens, not a lifestyle. That's why you have your Good Postmodernists (like Roland Barthes with his indictment of contemporary mythologies), who are really building on what the very modernist Adorno did with negative dialectics, and then you have your Bad Postmodernists like Stanley Fish with his from-the-ivory-tower OpEd that will explain to you why academics and politics shouldn't mix. But at the apex of postmodernism, the pomo converges with the fundie, much like fascism and communism converge in those little political diagrams that make you feel like you are doing math and politics at the same time. The Fundamentalist Christian tenets, rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible, are identical to the Pomocon project--the deeds (good or otherwise) and the facts (substantiating or contrary) do not matter. The idea is reified to the point where it is the signifer and the signified, it is the only thing that matters. The superstructure not only informs the base, it shapes the base, and any inconsistensy from the base side of things does not matter because it is impossible. That's, like, a Text that cutely but unwisely insists on having a Likely Interpretation, or, God forbid, a Single Meaning. The Text isn't there to be interpreted, it's there to be written.

In conclusion, there is an old Russian joke about a "Chukcha"--the Russian ethnic group that figures most prominently, along with the Georgians and the Poles, in Russian ethnic jokes:

A Chukcha is applying for admissions to the Literature Department of Moscow State University (the Russian equivalent of Harvard). The admissions committee asks:
-Can you say a few things about the underlying themes in Dostoyevsky's works?
-I haven't read any Dostoyevsky.
-Well, can you reflect on the Russian character as it emerges in Pushkin's narratives?
-I haven't read any Pushkin.
-Would you say that Lermontov's stories set in the Caucases are critiques of the Tsarist Imperialist policies?
-I haven't read any Lermontov.
-Well, what have you read?
-Chukcha isn't a reader, Chukcha is a writer.

And if we need to be more explicit, here's another one:

-What is socialism?
-Socialism is like trying to catch a black cat in a dark room.
-What is communism?
-Communism is like trying to catch a black cat in a dark room, except that there is no cat in the room.
-And what is the dialectical approach to building communism?
-The dialectical approach to building communism is like trying to catch a black cat in a dark room, except that there is no cat in the room, and somebody keeps yelling that they caught the cat.

Now try it with neoliberalism, the Neocon Project and the Pomocon Empire. How did that work out for you?

And on that note, I hope against hope that this is the last tirade I write about this administration. At this point nothing would make me happier than trashing Kerry's neoliberal hawkish politics for the next four years because, dude, whatever it takes to dispatch The Apocalypse back to the Metaphorical Realm.