“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”
That was almost your
Catchphrase

We might call the ideology of tween media an ideology of perkiness, in which energetic, smart kids learn useful lessons and become better people; so it’s a little marvelous that the longest-running show on the Disney Channel has a main character who is what Sara Ahmed calls an affect alien, someone who refuses perky sociality in favor of laziness, selfishness, and low expectations. It’s particularly welcome that this comes in the form of a female character, Alex, because the demand to be enthusiastic and omnicompetent is directed especially to women in post-Fordist economies.

The connection between the show and the egoist anarchism of Max Stirner first occurred to me when I saw the episode in which Alex paints a large circle-A anarchist symbol but refuses to identify it as the symbol of any ideology (or “spook,” as Stirner would no doubt have it), insisting it is merely a symbol of her own sovereign ego.

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In another episode, it turns out that this surly indolence is an ethical commitment:

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I am, appropriately, too lazy to go and download all the episodes and make a compendium of clips demonstrating this at length. Luckily, the producers of the show condensed this into one episode, so all I need to do is summarize and then let you watch. In “Positive Alex,” Alex is forced to take part in the heteronormative ritual of the school dance. However, because she won’t adopt the normative feminine performance of pleasing smiles, the boys at school consider her too surly, and won’t be her date to the dance. So, she uses a magic spell to make herself more complaisant, an effect which is visually represented by rainbows leaving her body. The pressure, however, of being in this emotional closet makes her crazy, with disastrous consequences.

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White audience members’ consequent “panic,” she notes, is simultaneously posited as an intended effect, a positing that locates and circumscribes [artist Adrian] Piper as a strategizing subject. Rather than remaining cognizant of how their panic is produced in the moment of their own receptive uptake, white interlocutors instead construe Piper as the sovereign and willful originator of their discomfort, disorientation, and shock. (Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance, 186)

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(Note that this video contains repeated uses of the n-word.)

One of the best things about Curb Your Enthusiasm is its recognition of race as a site of particular awkwardness in the US. In the episode from which these clips are taken, Larry experiences the world as it appears to the paranoid opponent of political correctness; people of color, in this mindset, only exist in order to arrive just at the moment the (white) person is telling the “truth” about race, to entrap the white person into political incorrectness. By playing this worldview straight, Curb Your Enthusiasm shows how ridiculous it is, and so, I think, comments rather well on the sense, which pervades discussions of race in America, that the awkwardness that surrounds the topic is somehow the fault, or even the willed action of, people of color.

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2. In Memo­riam  So. Farewell then Wizards of Waverly Place You were the best Disney Channel Show About egoist anarchism And queer anti-sociality. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” That was almost your Catchphrase We might call the ideology of tween media an ideology of perkiness, in which...
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This does, though, raise a problem with the documentary, and indeed with Curtis’s work more generally. I think he’s doing this kind of Foucaldian tracing of discourses, but I’m basically guessing, because he’s not very explicit about what he is doing. There are various things about the way the program is put together that imply certain things about the epistemology, although they’re also rather contradictory. Curtis’s signature method, the construction of a documentary largely from archive footage some distantly, some closely related to the point being made, emphasizes the intellectual configuration being constructed is partial. In particular, building the program around juxtaposition tends to push against interpreting the relationships between the elements as causal, which of course is emphasized by the jumps in time throughout the program.

However  the soundtrack pushes in the other direction. The ominous music that frequently plays under apparently innocuous scenes keys us to expect bad consequences, and so imbues the program with a teleology, in which the negative consequences are already present in potential form at the origin of an idea. This is what Nietzsche calls “a perverse type of genealogical hypothesis of a genuinely English style” in which everything is explained by reference to an essence lying in its origins, rather than by appealing to something  “first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental, something additional” (On the Genealogy of Morals).

It’s the punctual and incidental aspects, not the teleological, that I think make the program worth our engagement. I do, though, have one concern about the intellectual collection that Curtis assembles, as I think he may be missing some distinctions in the way various concepts change over time. Specifically, he may subsume too much under the idea of the “machine.” Isn’t there quite a difference between the mechanism of industrial machinery, the circuits of electrified machines, and the information flows of networked machines and genes? And this difference would correspond to a distinction between the cybernetic systems with which Curtis begins, and the bioinformatic ones with which he ends (I think this might understood in terms of  a move from Parson’s cybernetic systems theory to Luhmann’s autopoesis, though I don’t know enough about Luhmann to be sure).

Curtis emphasizes the role of feedback in cybernetics, but he doesn’t mention that this was interpreted as making cybernetics the science of control, something which was very much of a piece with the technocratic interventionism of 1950s politics. The association of feedback systems with a form of self-regulation that eludes control comes later; at one point, Curtis briefly mentioned the move from mainframes to networked personal computers, which is  a mark of this change, from self-regulating systems which are centralized and basically comprehensible, and so controllable, to systems which are self-regulating because they are so complex they elude our grasp. In this, the failure of ecological systems theories would be a further step in the development of our contemporary homeostatic “common sense,” and not, as Curtis seems to suggest, a scientific refutation of it. (“Black ecology” would then be a further development of the same theme.)

This does not mean that Curtis’s argument is wrong, just that it could be enriched by making some further distinctions. In particular, I think this move from understanding systems in terms of control to understanding them in terms of complexity helps to think about the political implications of the story Curtis is telling. The problem Curtis identifies have, I think, a lot in common with Jodi’s criticisms of left enmeshment in communicative capitalism. It’s important, then, to recognize how close those of us on the anti-hierarchical left are to some of the ideas Curtis identifies as problematic (how could we not be, as they are ideas which really do structure much of our time), as well as ways we have of interpreting and using these ideas differently.

(The title of this post is from the poem which gave Curtis his title, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan.)

I crossposted this to An und für sich, where there’s some discussion and criticism of Curtis.

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Maybe the most high-profile example of this is the character of Ziva David on NCIS. Ziva, a former Mossad agent turned NCIS investigator, is an appealing character. She’s competent, smart, and funny, as well as being somewhat psychologically  damaged in the sort of way that makes for endearing TV characters (it also doesn’t hurt that the character is played by Cote de Pablo, who is very pretty although not even slightly Israeli).

But she also functions as a strange metonym for Israel. Her Mossad background is, particularly in her early appearances, brought up through references to her skills as an assassin and torturer, that is, through her extra-legal ruthlessness. The show is both horrified by and enamored with this ruthlessness – Ziva is continually reminded by other characters that her methods are not acceptable in America, with a mixture of pride, awe, and regret. Ziva, and thus Israel, is presented here as sublime in Burke’s sense, as inspiring a kind of fear that leads to admiration. The racist uses to which Burke puts this concept of the sublime (the natural sublimity of Blacks is adduced as a justification for slavery) perhaps points towards the racism underlying Israel’s simultaneous exclusion from and inclusion in Western “civilization” which Schalit notes in right-wing American attachments to Israel.

Israel, in the person of Ziva, functions as a kind of screen onto which Americans can project the terrible things America actually does abroad, but which it is ideologically committed to claiming not to do. I wonder if the approval of the assassination of bin Laden is a visible sign that US ideology has changes such that this disavowal is no longer necessary.

(There’s also something to be said about the fact that the role of fantasy-Israel is played by a female character, particularly as the other way in which Ziva’s Israeli-ness is figured is through her willingness to flout American gender roles, with her “just butch enough” clothing, her unabashed attitude to sex, and her occasional hints at bisexuality. This may be of a piece with the role female IDF soldiers play in the spurious “feminism” of American islamaphobes).

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Hellcats

What’s not so good about the show is the weirdly excessive individualism. Of course, most TV shows are implicitly individualist, assuming that every problem can be solved by an individual with sufficient gumption. What’s odd about Hellcats is that it repeatedly goes out of its way to mention collective action in order to dismiss it. The starting point of the show is that law student Marti loses the scholarship she had been receiving because her mother works for the university. Marti’s mother suggests they take this up with the union representing campus workers, of which she is a member, but Marti knows that the real solution is for her to take part in a competition to win a place on the cheerleading team, and the scholarship that goes with it. Later on, Marti’s law professor asks her to work for him on a case he intends to use to demonstrate the unconstitutionality of three-strikes laws. Marti gives an impassioned defense of the principle that, rather than caring about the thousands of people who are imprisoned under three-strikes laws, they should focus on proving the innocence of the particular individual involved in this test case; the professor’s moral sense is re-awakened, and he agrees to abandon his campaign against three-strikes laws.

I have to thank the show, though, for combining implied homosexuality and rampant individualism in a way which actually makes something clear about contemporary constraints on media representation of women’s sexuality, encapsulated by the figure of the bicurious cheerleader. What seems to allow this combination of homosexuality and American wholesomeness is that female characters are allowed to have some same-sex sex, on condition they don’t convert this into a substantive same-sex identification. One fairly harmless example of this is the (I assume intentional, aimed at the fanfic demographic) subtext of Hellcats; harmless because it is possible to read Marti and Savannah as genuinely lesbian-identified women who just by chance never explicitly mention this on screen. A more annoying example is the dramatically different level of seriousness accorded to male and female homosexuality in 90210. Last season saw Adrianna in a classic “gay-for-sweeps” subplot in which she left her boyfriend for a girl for two episodes, after which she reunited with her boyfriend and the story was never mentioned again. This season, on the other hand, Teddy’s realization that he is gay is taking up numerous episodes of angst and a coming-out scene that portrays his homosexuality as very serious and irreversible (this, incidentally, seems to now be the media-approved form of male homosexuality, in which you can be gay as long as you’re stoically heroic about it; see also the campaign to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell).

What these representations of female same-sex sexuality do, it seems to me, is erase the idea of sexuality as an identification that could lead to commonality and solidarity. There’s something in common here erasure of sexual identity that occurs in two denials of the existence of bisexuality (both of which, I regret to say, I have at one point subscribed to): there’s the biphobic claim that no-one is really bisexual, and those who claim to be are either homosexuals in denial or straights trying to grab some queer cachet; or there’s the mirror image hippyish claim that, like, everyone is naturally bisexual, yeah. What both miss is the Foucauldian point that sexuality is not a transparent or natural property of individuals, but something that is rendered possible by a particular social context.

Foucault in The History of Sexuality emphasizes the biopolitical utility of sexual identity, in which people are encouraged to identify with the categorizations that regulate them, but 40-odd years of LGBT activism show that this kind of biopolitical identification can be the basis of resistance as well as regulation. When seen in this context, and in the context of Hellcats‘ hyper-individualism, I wonder if this apparent trend towards fairly positive depictions of gay and bisexual women, on condition that these characters don’t actually identify as gay or bisexual (the state of limbo appropriately designated by the stupid term “bicurious”), is an attempt to push the Foucauldian logic of identification-as-segregation to an extreme that would preclude its political redeployment, by assigning every individual a (supposedly) unique and personalized sexuality.

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The remake, on the other hand, takes this potentially fascist starting point and really fucking runs with it. The new aliens aren’t just lizards, they’re secret lizards who have infiltrated the government and the media, and now they are offering universal healthcare as an attempt to poison humanity’s precious bodily fluids. They are, in other words, an anti-semitic stereotype. Now, I’m not saying that ABC and the makers of V are actually anti-semites. Rather, by making vague and deeply stupid gestures towards contemporary politics (ooh, universal healthcare, how topical), the show accidentally exposes underlying anti-semitism in contemporary political discourse: it’s the teabaggers and birthers as sci-fi (and it’s surely no accident that the one significant black character in the pilot has a secret radical past, and the same beard as ex-Maoist Van Jones).

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On the strength of Adam’s recommendation, I’ve been making my way through the show over the past month. Although from the beginning it was clear that the show looked beautiful and was marvelously acted, some of my initial concern remained: was the show’s 1960s setting anything other than window-dressing?It wasn’t until eight episodes into the first season that the thematic significance of the 1960s advertising industry became clear. The crucial scene comes when Don Draper drops in on his bohemian mistress and argues with her beatnik friends, who tell him that the adverts he creates are merely lies. Don’s response, that “there is no big lie, there is no system,” is quite correct. Advertising doesn’t simply lie about the world, on the contrary, as Don’s practice throughout the show makes clear, it tells, or rather constructs, a particular sort of truth, a kind of dream image of capitalism. In Mad Men, however, this accusation of lying strikes Don particularly closely, because he is a liar, who has been passing himself off under an assumed identity, that of Don Draper, which is not his own. Don has used this name to “make something of himself,” to recreate himself as a different person, but the falsehood leaves a stain of uncertainty, perhaps only visible to himself, in his identity.

Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism is not based around demanding that subjects conform to a specific identity, but rather demanding that they answer the question, “what do you want?” While the classical liberal subject was based on identity defined in relation to a structure of authority, the contemporary subject requires a continuous self-questioning based on a fundamental insecurity. Don Draper is precisely this subject, involved in the dream-construction of capitalism at precisely the time when symbolic authority was eroding and the subject of fixed identity was being replaced by the flexible subject. Mad Men is, in part, a dramatization of this transformation, and so is not about how different the 1960s were, but about how similar they are.

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The other position here focuses on House’s enjoyment; House’s ethics lie in embracing his enjoyment, rather than attempting to find some moralistic justification for his actions. Adam’s description of House enjoying medicine’s “inherent satisfactions” kind of aligns this with the Badiouian theory in that the ethical act depends on the specifics of the medical situation. But I think House would get the same enjoyment from some other intellectual pursuit; the medicine is at bottom extrinsic to House’s enjoyment. It would be interesting to consider the ethical implications of a character whose pursuit of an apparently praiseworthy pursuit hinges on an enjoyment that is extrinsic to, even at odds with, the apparent norms of that pursuit.

The Wire‘s Jimmy McNulty is just such a character. McNulty’s most prominent characteristic is his willingness to go uo against the Baltimore Police Department’s chain of command in order to pursue a case; but it’s not clear this is ever motivated merely by a desire to solve crimes. At the end of the first season, McNulty claims his pursuit of Barksdale was motivated by a desire to prove himself right; the beginning of the second season provides an even better example. In the first couple of episodes, McNulty spends a great deal of time and effort assembling information that ensures that murder investigations are opened into the deaths of 14 unknown women, something which he does, and with great pleasure, solely to fuck over his old commander, Major Rawls of the homicide unit, who will know have to deal with the statistical fallout of 14 unsolvable cases. What’s interesting here is that McNulty, employing the bureaucratic obstructions of the police department in order to pursue a personal vendetta, sets in motion a train of events that leads to these women being identified, and legal procedings against drug and human traffickers (the other impetus, it occours to me, is Major Valcheck’s even more petty vendetta against union boss Frank Sobotka).

(Adam also talks about House‘s medical utopia, in which doctors, rather than insurance companies, make decisions about treatment. I wonder how much this TV image—not confined to House—leads people to accept those absurd ads currently on TV talking about Obama’s terrifying plan to introduce bureaucrats into the US health care system. Of course, the ads’ fantasy healthcare system in which medical decisions are made by doctors actually exists, but it’s not in the US, it’s in the UK, and doubtless every other country with socialized medicine.)

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It’s not a surprise that the celebrity reality genre arrived in the UK so much earlier than in the US; as with so much else (Thatcher, financialization), the UK exhibits the tendencies of late capitalism in a purer form, with celebrity having been abolished over there a long time ago. Instead, there’s a continuum of decreasing glamor from the soap, to Heat, to Nuts, to the glamor model (the inclusion of the term “glamor” in the name being, of course, a sure sign of an absence of glamor in the thing).  The difference between the last two categories is kind of interesting; while glamor models perform an absurdly hyperbolic version of femininity (the really quite charming Jordan being perhaps the best recent example), the lads mags put as much, if not more, effort into insisting that the version of femininity they present is not a performance at all, which is the specific performance of which Jo Guest, Donna Air, and Sheridan Smith are masters.

This reminds me, in a roundabout sort of way, of the dual descriptions that circulate on the internet of Fox News’s female anchors as looking like either porn stars or transsexuals. What I think maybe  people are groping at with these misogynistic and transphobic comparisons is a sense that Jamie Colby or Megyn Kelly perform gender in a way that’s somehow too obvious. The mistake here is to think that it’s only when you’re sexy that you’re performing sex; but Tamron Hall’s no-nonsense short hair, or Brit Hume’s rumbling monotone delivery are also gendered performances.

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Which is why, “realistic” though it may be, The Wire‘s brilliance doesn’t lie in a realism of form.Quite the contrary; The Wire frequently adopts self-consciously stagey or filmic tropes (the most obvious of these, of course, would be the Western elements that run throughout the portrayal of Omar). But the show is realist in another sense: as opposed to moralist. The show’s few missteps have occoured when an applied moral evaluation slipped in, such as the horrible screeching of gears in the fourth season when they attempted to shift Carcetti from a personally venal politician to a decent guy whose personal decency is politically irrelevant.

The other instance that has troubled me is the shift from the Barksdale organization to Marlo’s organization that is the underlying narrative of the later three seasons; Marlo’s strange emotional blankness, particularly when compared to the portrayal of Stringer Bell, always seemed to have a moralizing psychopathologization to it. But an aside in this paper on The Wire at Infinite Thought has me thinking of another possible explanation of this arc. Alberto and his co-author remark that:

The “postmodern institutions” [of the drug trade] are remarkably, well, Fordist, in the sense that, following Vincenzo Ruggiero’s suggestion, this “crime as work” depends on the classic capitalist division of labour between programming and execution – dramatised in the show by the seemingly infinite distance between leader of the gang, Avon Barksdale, and the ‘hoppers’ on the street.

Now, this is true of the Barksdale organization, but I don’t think it is exactly true of Marlo’s operation. When the Barksdale organization disintegrates, the street level dealers who used to be part of the organization don’t end up working for Marlo, but as formally independent dealers who transfer money to Marlo in a variety of ways: as rent for the corners they work on, or, later, because they have to buy their drugs from him. Marlo’s organization is neoliberal in all kinds of ways, including the way in which, as with the neoliberal state, a decrease in size is accompanied by an increase in violence.

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