Making Up a Guy to Get Mad At: The (Completely) Imaginary Institution of Society

 

One fact stands out in the recent Supreme Court Decision 303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis and that is that the web hosting company in question has yet to sell wedding websites (see the passage from the dissenting opinion below). There is also news that the plaintiff, Lorie Smith may have fabricated a gay couple who supposedly enquired about web hosting.  I believe that this little bit of legal trivia reveals something fundamental about our current era, it is one in which the fears and fantasies of the powerful are taken more seriously than the realities of the dispossessed. 

It is the Symbolism, Stupid: Trump and Sanders

There is a certain similarity in criticism of Sanders and Trump. I am not referring to the symmetry posited by pundits of the radical center for who every left has an equal and opposite right--the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, Fox News and CNN, Iron Man and Captain America, but to a criticism offered by those far from the radical center that argue that Trump and Sanders are not the outside of the existing political spectrum. Trump's supposedly outlandish promises to deport millions of undocumented workers is not that different from existing policy. Sander's socialism is just what a previous generation would have called a new deal democrat, or what the rest of the world calls "center-left". 

"Live Every Week Like it is Shark Week": Remarks on the Ecology of the Mediasphere

Friday morning, as the local and national media went on a feeding frenzy of sorts over Hurricane Irene,  complete with radar maps and rain-coated correspondents bracing themselves against the wind and rain, the following image, taken of a TV set in Miami made it onto youtube and into my facebook news feed.

Please Be Aliens. Please Be Aliens: Limits of the Apocalyptic Imaginary

Aliens have made it the news at least three times in the last week. This is fairly impressive considering the fact that there have been no shortage of actual events to report on (stock market collapse, the fallout from the Uk riots, Syria, etc.). This could be taken as symptomatic of the usual August slow news cycle, less a reflection of an actual lack of newsworthy stories than a collective decision not to reflect on the world.  Past Augusts have brought us such stories as "Shark Attack Summer." August is the month dedicated to frivolous stories that make the rest of the years sound bytes  and pseudo-events look serious by comparison. Taken together, however these reports construct an interesting snapshot of our existing political imaginary, the reflection of our social and political condition in our avoidance of it. 

Unclear on the Concept

I was thoroughly amused and delighted by the events recounted in today's New York Times. First, one has to admire the sheer discipline and organization that led to physical copies of a faux-times being handed out across New York City. More importantly there is the content of the edition itself. While it is in many respects "too liberal" for my taste, wage caps, taxes that reflect social cost etc., It at least has the advantage of expressing some fundamental fantasies and desires: most importantly the end of the Iraq war.

However, as the article makes clear the "Times" quite simply fails to get it. First of all, it cannot really be called a spoof. Second, it is almost sad to learn that the only response to such an event that the article can imagine is selling a copy of the counterfeit "Times" on ebay. (Dream Big) What the authors fail to grasp is the politics of the imagination: the political dimension of imagining a better world. It is quite possible that many of the people who received copies of the paper felt a moment of elation when they read its headlines. There is something valuable in that feeling, if even for a moment, that another world is possible.

Since the election last week there has been a small scale reaction, laying the ground for a mini-Thermidor, against the tiny, and all too modest progress of change. Articles in the "Times" and elsewhere have sought to curtail the sense of the possible, reminding us that America is a "center-right" nation, lest we get any ideas. What these articles forget, what the "Times" forget is that the political orientation of the nation, and the sense of the possible, are not given, but produced.

Those Who Dream with Their Eyes Open

Recently, I picked up Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. I am not really sure why, it is not the sort of thing I generally read. I would classify it as pop-progressive, and I find that in general I do not have time to read those sorts of things. For example it took nearly a decade, and several friends, students, and colleagues recommending it to me, for me to get around to reading No Logo.

The book takes as its starting point the following anecdote about the Bush administration, relayed in The New York Times:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

While many within the “center-left-progressive” camp have cited this passage to stress the Bush administration’s disconnect from reality, claiming with pride to be part of the “reality-based community,” Duncombe takes it in an opposite direction, pointing out how ineffective the “murmured” enlightenment principles have been within politics. Ultimately he argues that “progressives” (to use his term) need to understand the constitutive nature of the imagination; the way the imagination, desire, and fantasy constitute community, subjectivity, and investments. Now, the book is not primarily theoretical in its orientation. It deals with specific sites of the imagination, video games, advertising, celebrity-worship, and Las Vegas, all of which are usually held in contempt, and tries to reconstruct their radical potential. This is done through the example of such political movements as “Billionaires for Bush” and “Reclaim the Streets.”

Now, I am in fundamental agreement with this book, I still have my suspicions about “Grand Theft Auto,” however, but aside from that I basically agree. What strikes me is that his central criticism of progressives, the idea that politics should eschew imagination, desire, and fantasy in favor of truth, reason, and the force of the better argument, is not just a bias on the left. It is also what I call “the spontaneous ideology of philosophy,” the idea that the “better argument always wins”: that truth has an effectivity in and of itself, and once enunciated and circulated it will change the world. Duscombe does not address this dimension. Like I said the book is not very theoretical, aside from references to Debord and Machiavelli, it addresses practical instances.

Of course there have been a few philosophers who have broken with this ideology; notably Marx, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and, oddly enough, perhaps even J.S. Mill. I was struck to discover again the following passage in Mill: “It is a piece of idle sentiment sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.” In some ways this reads like a muted echo of Spinoza’s idea of limited effectivity of the true insofar as it is true, but ultimately I think that Mill is conflicted on this point: propagating “true” principles while at the same time recognizing the forces of custom, habit, affects, and fashion, have more force than any principle.

Well, I seem to have blogged myself into a corner. It is not my intention to discuss the contradictions of Mill. I guess I will end with two projects that I think need more work: First, the constitutive dimension of the imagination; and, Second, the critique of the “spontaneous ideology of philosophy.”