Recording Surface

10 dead in Cairo protest camp clearance (more…)

I take it as a sign of deep consternation in elite circles that in the year of Katrina, Cronulla, riots in the banlieus, London bombings, man-worsened natural disasters in southeast and central Asia, floundering primitive-accumulation projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a rejected EU constitution, to name just a few of the crises, Time magazine has with its Person of the Year designation assured us that the wealthy and powerful–in the form of the world’s richest man, his wife, and the world’s most important pop star (whose politics may now be even more insufferable than his music)–do indeed care about the well-being of the sick and poor. Ugh. They must be desperate.

Twenty years ago today, on December 22, 1985, Dennes Dale Boon was killed in a car wreck in the Arizona desert. Singer for the Minutemen, political activist, writer of antiwar songs, enemy of Reagan’s America, D. Boon spoke most eloquently through his guitar. Most punk guitarists hid behind distortion and power chords. D. Boon plucked and picked notes straight to his amp. It sounded more like Thelonious Monk’s late-40s piano than anything punk or rock has ever produced. It also often sounded like he was strangling a chicken. And it’s still beautiful.

I just heard that on the evening the Austin City Council amended the public-order laws, it also passed a resolution “expressing the City Council’s opposition to the activities of the Minutemen and directing the City Manager to report to the City Council any identified activity of the Minutemen within the City.” (more…)

Austin yesterday enacted a couple of nastily repressive changes to its “public order” ordinance, changes that naturally target the city’s poorer and darker residents and nonresidents. “Public order,” of course, is a euphemism–and, unlike most euphemisms, not even a particularly sunny one–for the microphysical management of people’s existence and behavior, the policing of bodily flows and movements. The goal, as always, is to protect the community. (more…)

On the permanent page, an extended quote from Brian Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 109-112. It’s a reading of Louis Feuillade’s silent film Vendemiaire that captures some of the Othering produced by populist politics, its creation of an idealized past, and its reliance on transcendence. (more…)

Another painful antiporn piece from Robert Jensen, this time with Gail Dines. Even when he’s writing about sex, Jensen is pedantic, boring, and unfailingly correct.

I’ll leave the rebuttal of the article’s antiporn silliness to those better positioned than me, but I will note that it does contain a couple of (accidental) gems. After warning us that “[s]exual desire can constrain people’s capacity for critical reason” and that “[l]eftists–especially left men–need to get over the obsession with getting off,” the authors write:

Critiques of the power of commercial corporate media are ubiquitous on the left. Leftists with vastly different political projects can come together to decry conglomerates’ control over news and entertainment programming. Because of the structure of the system, it’s a given that these corporations create programming that meets the needs of advertisers and elites, not ordinary people.

Jensen and Dines think applying this mode of critique would illuminate how pornography exploits. I think it nicely illuminates why leftist media criticism sucks. Such criticism performs its routines always employing the same motifs: the obligatory recitation of the three evil C’s, commercial, corporate, and consolidation (the latter is not stated by Jensen and Dines, but it’s always implied); the lamentation, in Jensen and Dines’s words, that “profit-hungry corporative [sic] executives construct our culture” (as opposed to all those charity-hungry execs?); the banal assertion that media companies pursue their own interests above all else (I’m shocked, shocked); the conviction that corporate-media content is all about brainwashing and indoctrination; and the conclusion that the people are just unblinking recipients of such ideological overload. Media critics never countenance that “the ordinary people” it speaks for could actually enjoy corporate entertainment, or that they could use it for their own purposes, or that they could both see and disregard the ideology it contains.

What’s more troubling about this style of political critique is that, despite making gestures toward being a structural analysis, it nonetheless posits an outsider (the corporate conglomerate) that transcends the natural social order and is ruining “our” (the people’s) social yearnings. In a word, it’s an analysis that is populist. Populist criticism of course rests on two fundamental tenets: (1) what’s needed is not social transformation but regime change, new, less-corrupt personnel that will leave the social institutions intact; and (2) “the people” is an empowered group and should be the source of power, but the people is also an act of exclusion, a way of drawing lines between groups; sometimes the line is drawn between rulers and the ruled, but often it is drawn between one people and another. In short, the antipolitics of populism makes it amenable to nationalism, militarism, and capitalism.

Aside: Populism has been a much-debated topic in blogville lately. Check out posts at Archive, Posthegemonic Musings, Le Colonel Chabert, K-Punk, and Ghost in the Wire.

Sorry, dear readers, for the ten-day absence from posting. I have been traveling with the kids, seeing relatives, and going to my father’s retirement party (lucky bastard), all of which has left me too exhausted to do any writing. But now I’m back home and rested, and more-regular posting will resume starting today. Thanks for your understanding.