The Ethical Governor

I’ve been very interested in all aspects of what is now branded as the Long War, which I see as a war between Finance and Humans, rather than East versus West, Capitalism versus Islam, or whatever.

A military invasion to secure resources and a financial austerity package to placate bondholders are all part of a unified process. It’s just that force is applied in a somewhat cruder manner in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Africa.

What I’ve done is transposed the action to the Homeland, where it will eventually arrive anyway. The Drones are Chamber of Commerce assets, part of the elite Milton Friedman Unit.

John Butler

The Butler brothers

Academic Repression

On some campuses, administrative officials have monitored classes, questioned the political content of books and films, and screened the lists of guest speakers—all in the name of scholarly objectivity and balance.

In some places, however, trustees and administrators readily pay out huge sums for guest lectures by committed, highly partisan, rightwing ideologues.

The guardians of academic orthodoxy never admit that some of their decisions about hiring and firing faculty might be politically motivated. Instead they will say the candidate has not published enough articles. Or if enough, the articles are not in conventionally acceptable academic journals. Or if in acceptable journals, they are still wanting in quality and originality, or show too narrow or too diffuse a development. Seemingly objective criteria can be applied in endlessly elastic ways….

Mainstream academics treat their politically safe brands of teaching and research as the only ones that qualify as genuine scholarship. Such was the notion used to deny Samuel Bowles tenure at Harvard. Since Marxist economics is not really scholarly, it was argued, Bowles was neither a real scholar nor an authentic economist. Thus centrists ideologues have purged scholarly dissidents under the guise of protecting rather than violating academic standards. The decision seriously split the economics department and caused Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontif to quit Harvard in disgust.

Radical academics have been rejected because their political commitments supposedly disallow them from objective scholarship. In fact much of the best scholarship comes from politically committed scholars.

One goal of any teacher should be to introduce students to bodies of information and analysis that have been systematically ignored or suppressed–a task that usually is better performed by iconoclasts than by those who accept existing institutional and class arrangements as the finished order of things. So it has been feminists and African-American researchers who, in their partisan urgency, have revealed the previously unexamined sexist and racist presumptions and gaps of conventional scholarship.

Likewise, it is leftist intellectuals (including some who are female or nonwhite) who have produced the challenging scholarship about popular struggle, political economy, and class power, subjects remaining largely untouched by centrists and conservatives.16 In sum, a dissenting ideology can awaken us to things regularly overlooked by conventional scholarship.

Orthodox ideological strictures are applied also to a teacher’s outside political activity. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an instructor of political science, Ted Hayes, an anti-capitalist, was denied a contract renewal because he was judged to have “outside political commitments” that made it impossible for him to be objective. Two of the senior faculty who voted against him were state committee members of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.17 There was no question as to whether their outside political commitments interfered with their objectivity as teachers or with the judgments they made about colleagues.

–Michael Parenti, “Academic Repression, Past and Present”

Shock of the Gray

This keynote address is worth watching in support of my previous post (just finished a major rewriting to improve its coherency), as this is clearly touching on very significant biopolitical issues. I don't vouch for either the New America Foundation or Ted Fishman, as my interest here is only to provide evidence of the growing saliency of these issues in public discourse.

Techno-mysticism & death in space

Not sure if the "space archaeology" blog has kept abreast of the development of Promession (be surprised if it hadn't). I would expect though that the archaeological remit of that blog would not be particularly receptive to an analysis that could string together religion, mysticism, and technology. I'm not going to couch my discussion in terms of naturalist transmigration theory either. My sympathies are more with the theme of "haunted media" explored by various works of science fiction, which can be found by anyone who cares to perform even a cursory search on Japanese anime (or "J-Horror" for that matter) and "ghosts" (and then trace through the influence on the obvious example from Hollywood i.e. The Matrix).

But I'm not just talking about science fiction and/or Japan: I was happy to interview Steve Fuller about his latest book because it reminds us that [for many people] biology is intrinsically part of the Great Chain of Being- Fuller's characterisation of religiously inclined scientists is echoed by Toshiya Ueno's description of certain philosophers:

That is to say, God, for Feuerbach and other philosophers, was a

center or a nodal point of human relationships (or of a network). 

This is no exaggeration. Historically speaking, religions and mysticism 

have always functioned as informational networks and, indeed, have been media, 

itself. This is clear in the etymological argument that the word "medium" 

originally meant shaman. Of course, as you know, the shaman is always a mediator

 between God (or a transcendent being) and human (or an objectal being). The issues

 of religion, mysticism, fetishism, and so on necessarily bring us face to face 

with the problematics of the spectacle, the spectre, and the mediator. 

Sol Yurick, who is a novelist and critic, argues and analyses these problematics 

in his influential book _Metatron_. (I'm the translator of the Japanese edition of

 this book.) He writes: "Modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of

 angels....The Catholic Church is a communicating organism with an apparatus of

 switches and relays and a communicating language for the input of prayers through

 a churchly switchboard up to Heaven and outputs returned to the supplicant."

Permit me to briefly illustrate these problematiques with a few more sci-fi references. I was thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of this more expansive technological sense of a medium, when I happened across Gary Westfahl's Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction. Chapter Five considers "Space Stations as Haunted Houses", which could be construed as a warning about the mysticism and fetishism associated with "the problematics of the spectacle" Ueno refers to. I can think of another example: Alien 3, at least in the unfilmed Vincent Ward version, offered another reminder in its portrayal of a religious community living on a space station, who are in turn decimated by the xenomorph's arrival. In that case, the irony had to do with how the ascetism of the monks prevented them from understanding the true nature of the peril they faced (in spite of how they are in effect living a highly technologically mediated existence-- a space station-- based on an illusion of simplicity; kind of like Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop). So, they too could have benefited from Ueno's paper, which advocates a "bio-morphism", to acknowledge how:

the situation in media (sub)culture, or in any social

terrain, always has been (or will be) "under construction". It is urgent

 that we find the symptoms of "under construction" for our situation, because

 for us,both techno-mysticism and media tribes can become medicine and poison

 at the same time (as pharmakon). It is a"gift" to  us that they will be able 

to become the basis for conservative ideology or critical thought. 

I imagine that more of these conversations will take place over time. Of course, it is too early yet to guess the full ramifications for new technologies such as Promession. We don't know whether it will ever become an ongoing concern. But if we are obliged to face up to it as part of what it means to be ecologically responsible, I'm hopeful this "gift" will remain permanently "under construction" in the manner Ueno recommends. Promession could clearly be used on an everyday basis here on Earth, so we shouldn't get too distracted about what it could mean for social relationships in the comparatively rarefied environment of space stations. Irrespective of the setting, any focus on the logistics of simple "waste" disposal can never hide "the inconvenient truth" of haunted media. One need only consider how spiritualism was a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomized vision of the afterlife. Jeffrey Sconce has discussed how the rise of postmodern media criticism is yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet. It seems possible then that biotechnology will be added to this list in the 21st Century, with "life management" techniques such as Promession becoming central to debates about transcendence through transmission: a metaphysical preoccupation with the boundaries of space and time as the meaning of life and death continues to change. This picture will become more complicated should the technologies to facilitate transhumanism ever become more readily available. So these are some of the issues that will continue to haunt our technologically mediated life cycle long into the future.....