The Ideology of the last 8 years

[Cain]

An interesting section from "Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11" :

Lesson One. "The occupation of Iraq will be an enormous success because once free of their shackles the Iraqi 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. Such beliefs are not the cynical, deceptive cover for something else, but true articles of faith. Capitalist ideology isn't a false consciousness that can be corrected by reality testing. It's a deliberate self-deception of a delusional order, a fantasy or fantasmatic consciousness that is imposed on history so that all contingencies 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.

This understanding of ideology, like the nine that follow, 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.
Ideology isn't false consciousness. It's fantasmatic consciousness, the creation of illusions and self-delusions.

Lesson Two. Ground zero. As Chapter 1 showed, the appropriation of this term to refer to the site of what was the World Trade Center
illustrates the basic psychological operation that sustains ideology: the inversion or reversal of meaning. That operation sets the stage for
employment of the most primitive psychotic defense mechanisms — evacuation and projective identification — in order to cleanse the collective consciousness of any possibility of learning from history. Surplus aggression is thereby liberated as a justified attack on an "evil" that has been placed totally outside us. The result of these psychological operations is the solidification of the only relation ideology can form to history. Ideology takes the past and inverts its meaning in order to repeat again what was done before. In this repetition compulsion History doesn't repeat itself as farce however; it repeats itself as expanded aggression. Ideology isn't based on false ideas. It's based on the necessity of employing primitive, psychotic defense mechanisms in order to exorcise traumatic events.

Lesson Three. Instead of declaring war on Al Qaeda, Dubya declared war on Terrorism. Moreover, that glorious battle had to come cloaked in theological terms so that a desire for omnipotence could find in global actions a way to confirm an infantile identity. 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 serve omnipotent desire by constituting the next step in a progress toward the end of history. Being unable to learn from history and seeking to bring about the end of history — recall here this post-Cold-War boast by Francis Fukuyama and others— are functions of the same underlying psychotic desire, which today shapes both policy studies and military action. The psychotic hatred of reality requires the extinction of all otherness. Putting an end to history is its defining project. The ghostly peace it seeks is only attained when nothing any longer exists that could oppose its logic. This understanding of ideology mandates a further transformation of 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 history, a new task beckons: to liberate the psychotic kernel from the fantasmatic shell.

Ideology is grounded in necessities far deeper than popular beliefs and prejudices. Such beliefs maintain their hold only because they
serve a deeper necessity. Understanding the psychological defense-mechanism of inversion enables us to 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, the void we incessantly flee and deny. Fantasms provide the frame that makes
reality endurable because fantasies are acts of magical reasoning that give evacuation and projective identification a way to fashion an
omnipotent identity, which whenever challenged moves toward psychosis. Psychotic necessity is thus the true reason why Empire is the destiny we now brazenly announce to an incredulous world. Ideology derives from the psychotic register of the psyche and performs the
three operations required to satisfy the inversion that defines psychosis:  i.e., projective identification, evacuation, and surplus aggression. These are the means whereby one locates an inner disorder in an external object so that by attacking and annihilating that object one exorcises what one cannot face about oneself.

Lesson Four. In the age of hyperreality and simulation, predicting and producing the future necessarily become inseparable. 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 wanted could bet money on the date for events such as the following: the death of Saddam Hussein or Yasser Arafat, the next major terrorist attack in the U.S., the discovery of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, the assassination of Ariel Sharon. The official rationale: the Defense Department would thereby get statistical "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 finally good capitalists too and won't be able to 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 in 2002 and have shown scientifically that the price of orange juice is an accurate predictor of the weather in Florida!

The speciousness of this argument isn't irrelevant; it's the point. For what PAM offers is a fantasmatic satisfaction of the cardinal imperative of capitalist ideology: a fetishization and worship of the market as the privileged space for the projection of fantasies, fears, and desires.
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 informing belief of necessity 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's a 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 inform the system as a whole. Texts such as PAM are privileged objects of ideological critique because they show that the underlying psychosis moves 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 PAM 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 a final triumph of good over evil." The inherent logic of ideology demands the formulation of policies and projects in which the underlying rationality takes the form of pseudo-rational ideas. Such policies are surreal texts that must be read as pure wish fulfillments that derive from the ideological Unconscious, that register at the core of ideology that knows no No and must therefore project a dream-state in which all contradictions are annulled and all desires fulfilled.

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."  Why Roe v.  Wade must be dismantled and gay marriage made a primary campaign issue, all the better to motivate 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 specter of citizens who are anything but obedient, respectful—and afraid.

Ideology is inherently fascistic and surveillance is its priest because the inherent goal of ideology is to totalize the operations needed to give
it omnipotent control over all possible contingencies. History only makes sense to Dubya and Company 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 in which all otherness has been eliminated. Ideology is driven by an obsessional need to totalize a desire for omnipotence. That effort is ruled by the contradiction that defines obsessionalism: the production of new uncertainties, renewed paranoia, and the consequent projection of a demand that can be satisfied only when history is over and all otherness extinguished.

[LMNO]

Not to sound redundant, but Whoa.  This is good stuff.

[Cain]

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 necessarily desire to possess
"all good things" in a logic of accumulation that is infantile since it can tolerate no contradictions or limitations. Choosing among a conflict of goods is unintelligible and repugnant. Annexation is the only operation that makes sense to a consciousness that has internalized capitalism. 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 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. That 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 unable to feel any other way. Capitalist ideology fuses 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 and finally indistinguishable processes.

Lesson Seven. Compulsory happiness brings us to the role in ideology of what should have been its primary critic. In using psychoanalytic categories to analyze ideology, my effort is 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 by and large the "identity wing" of the ideological project. This wing performs perhaps the most important function: social engineering in order to create 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 fruition of that project: the creation, as a 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 a strong, stable ego-identity always moves 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 justifi cation. 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 affirmative ways of feeling that wed subjects to the system because such feelings constitute the only way they can relate to experience.

Feeling good must perforce be enacted with the rigidity and regularity of a behavioral law of stimulus–response in service to the underling rule: one should never have bad feelings; indeed, all feelings labeled "negative" must be shunned. This is why 9-11 was a trauma that could
not be responded to traumatically. Instead, the trauma had to be resolved with good feelings restored and as quickly as possible. Any response to events that sustains pain is by definition bad. Faced with trauma, psychology performs what is for capitalism its function — putting Humpty Dumpty back together again by helping the populace reaffirm the founding emotional belief: that every trauma must be
resolved through recovery of those positive feelings without which, we are told, life would be meaningless.

Our task thus entails a new psychological 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. If we are to free ourselves from capitalism's monopoly over emotional experience, tragic self-overcoming and not adaptation must become the relationship we
live to ourselves. Psychology is the capstone of the ideological process. Its function under capitalism is social engineering: the transformation of quiet desperation into the noisy affi rmation of docile subjects wedded to the collective hosannah that deprives them of inwardness.

Lesson Eight. The opposite drive, however, has today assumed 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 in New York, in Princeton, and elsewhere of "shows deemed inappropriate at this time" because they ask us to question when what everyone wants from the arts now 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) false resolution of trauma through the offering of 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 thereby restoring us to a "humanity" that is essentialistic and ahistorical. Such an aesthetic cannot learn from history because it has "always already" transcended it. What it regards as its superior "humanism" really amounts, however, to little more than a priori emotional needs imposed on events in order to protect and reaffirm a system of beliefs that has as its informing purpose a "metaphysical" containment of the tragic.

Art as oppositional discourse thereby receives from this ideology what it must henceforth take as its task: the deracination of every "structure of feeling" that weds art to the effort to please audiences and reaffirm their identities. 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. Ideology is the means through which the sources of resistance are contained a priori by structures of feeling that dictate the response to traumatic events so that any possibility of knowledge and genuine change is rendered impossible. Far from incidental, this is the ideological formation that holds the entire ideological edifice in place, determining what we must feel and predetermining what we cannot know. In its working upon feeling, ideology is inherently behaviorist. Its effort is to create a populace bound to ideology by emotional stimulus–response
mechanisms that cause its subjects to salivate to certain beliefs the way Pavlov's dogs salivated to the bell.

Lesson Nine. On August 6, 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 various proposals for production of 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.

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 Iraq ... or, as one pundit suggested, already smuggled out and hiding somewhere else. (The WMD functions as Bush and Company's
Lacanian objet a.) For the imagination of nuclear winter there will always be such conferences where, as in PAM, contradictions come
together as in the logic of the dream, a logic where desire cannot be negated and where expression of the deepest unconscious wish-
structure is assured. A specter is haunting Amerika, the specter of Hiroshima. What we did then must be repeated, if only in fantasy
(and supposedly in a diminished form) in order 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. But as in Macbeth fear
for us can only be the return of projections which must be evacuated again by an even greater projection of the founding act. Thus the
hydrogen bomb. Star wars. And for the twenty-first century and a new historical situation — the Age of Empire or State Terrorism and
counterterrorism — the production of new tactical nuclear weapons as both practical and justifiable. In that 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 thus squares with what after fifty years we now know about why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated. Those motives remain atthe core of our policy toward the world. Once again history does not repeat itself as farce; it repeats itself as psychotic necessity. Ideology guarantees the continued projection of the founding psychosis as the blank check on which the entire edifice draws for its sustenance; for in its work
ideology forms a circle that cannot be broken into, one which resolves experience and history into the ceaseless repetition of the same.

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. The narcissistic grandiosity thereby unleashed is wedded to the ultimate
inversion: Thanatos eroticized provides the one and only, supreme and irresistible, libidinal pleasure—the pleasure of unleashing a destructiveness that voids all inner tensions, thereby completing the project of ideology by 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 moment's 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 nuke '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 time ... That's
their tough luck for being there." Ideology is the wedding of everything to the eroticization of Thanatos.

That eroticization is the through-line of recent American history, the key to understanding the true goal of capitalist ideology: to create
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 a great poem Robert Lowell wrote in 1967 entitled "Waking Early Sunday Moring." Lowell there identified global war as our monotonous sublime.  Monotonous because it's 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 realize the objective correlative of their own inner condition.

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 in order to show that sustaining trauma is the act that enables us to know history for the first time through the act of
apprehending—at the very moment they go into operation—the psychological mechanisms whereby it is denied. This epistemological opportunity speaks, moreover, 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 of us whenever we sacrifice our solidarity with the dead in order to satisfy our psychological and emotional needs.

[Cain]

Formatting that is a nightmare on three hours sleep.

[LMNO]

Yowch.  Good stuff.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Holy crap, this is freaking awesome.

[Triple Zero]

Hm I just read it all but I dont think I quite got the point of what he was trying to say because of the complex language. what is "obsessionalism", for instance?

it's all kind of woolly, I think he could have used clearer language to make his case and reach a larger audience.

[Cain]

Obsessionalism is a psychoanalytic term, I believe.  Most of the others seem to come from Critical Theory, which isn't that hard to understand, once you get into it.

[Honey]

Very interesting!  Thanks & respect!  It dovetails a relatively more recent obsession of mine - propaganda & critical thinking.

OF ALL THE WORDS WE USE to talk about talk, propaganda is perhaps the most mischievous.  The essential problems its use poses, and never resolves, are reflected in the following definition, given by no less a personage than the late Aldous Huxley:

There are two kinds of propaganda-rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and nonrational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.

This definition is, of course, filled with confusion and even nonsense, both of which are uncharacteristic of Huxley and only go to show how propaganda can bring the best of us down.
http://www.neilpostman.org/articles/etc_36-2-postman.pdf

I've been reading Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
http://www.questiaschool.com/read/6003292

Brought to mind especially A Plea for Clear Thinking

Cain?  You are the best!  No wait.  Triple Zero?  You are the best!  No wait.  LMNO?   You are the best!   ...  ...  ...



BAFFLED APPLE

[Corvidia]

Awesome. Thanks!