heuristics 2

Yesterday's Guardian reports an official death toll for the Islamabad Red Mosque siege of fifty eight: eight soldiers, fifty militants. Acting mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, in touch with local television via mobile phone, had earlier reported deaths in the hundreds even before the Government's final assault. Today's China Daily puts the figure at 102. Mr Ghazi was killed in Tuesday's attack having already predicted "my martyrdom is certain now". The violent end of this confrontation was probably inevitable from the first shots being fired at security forces from inside the mosque.

The Government raid that degenerated into the siege occured in response to escalating para-police activity by "hardliners" associated with the mosque. The BBC describes these militants as being involved in:

"a morality campaign which in recent weeks included the abduction of police officers and people accused of running brothels, as well as raids on music and DVD shops."

...to which the Government initially responded in a conciliatory way. The adoption of a more confrontational approach (to what are blatantly crimes) followed complaints from the Chinese Government concerning mistreatment of its citizens.

Clearly this was a complex situation. But one is immediately struck by the senselessness of the militants' acts. Did they really believe they they could win? Wasn't their position unrealistic?

It's worth considering how these events are replayed through the media. There's always potental for ordinary bias and misinformation, but there's also the matter of journalists and editors making a complex event intelligible in a short article.

This is the first paragraph of an article from the BBC News website written at the start of the siege:

"Barely two weeks ago, Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, was battling for his political survival. The war drums being beaten by the opposition at home were reaching a crescendo. His battle with the country's chief justice had taken a serious toll on his image as a military man who loathes the pettiness of everyday politics. More importantly, perhaps, his Western allies seemed to be getting increasingly impatient with his seeming inability to deal decisively with Islamist extremists. All this seems to have changed dramatically over the last three days, after Gen Musharraf gave his administration the green light for dismantling a radical seminary located in the heart of capital, Islamabad"

...which is to present the confrontation between Musharraf and the Islamists in terms of an index that mediates between them. No information about the parties needs to be supplied, only the relative movements of the index, given the presupposition that the interests of the contending parties are strictly antithetical.

(As if there were two balloons in a box, and as one is inflated, so the other is compressed.)

This is a coherent heuristic system, useful in some ways for passing on information, because it dramatises. But in this case a supposition is introduced concerning the antithetical orientation of these two parties, and it's intoduced (I believe) methodologically, in order to help the story along; as it were "unconsciously". This supposition may be fallacious.

Mainstream opinion suggests a relationship between Pakistani secret services and these Islamists, at least tacit approval. Imran Khan, writing in The Guardian asks:

"A number of questions arise. Why was action not taken immediately? How were militants and arms able to ge in under the gaze of the police and intelligence services? And why were other measures, including shutting off electricity at the mosque, not exhausted earlier?"

al Jazeera asks a similar question:

"In Pakistan – governed by generals for more than half of its sixty-year history - just what is the relationship between mosque and the military? "

structuralist pornography

homo lacanianus

For the committed postmodernist, what's interesting in Slavoj Žižek's articles in the Washington Post isn't so much their content, but the politics of their style. This is the introduction to an article Žižek contributed to the Washington Post of the 24th March this year:

"Since the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques?"

...which is really antiphilosophical: presenting a tangle of discursive elements unattributed to any speaker. For whom is moral outrage mixed with doubts? Who is vacillating over whether claims apparently extorted from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed under torture can be trusted? Who wonders if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's vanity precedes his humanity, or vice-versa?

The affectivity of this paragraph is the affectivity of structuraism. By structuralism I mean philosophy not as a practice, but as a transcendental structure.

Structuralism is first conjured in this opening paragraph, with the gaping discrepancy between Žižek's philosophical credentials and his antiphilosophical practice. His statement is a variation of Baudrillard's practice of presenting an inverted truth and alongside it a fantastic justification. The complete inversion of truth suggests the infinite extension of philosophy: a structuralism.

Žižek continues:

"It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of legality. We thus have de facto "legal" and "illegal" criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration.

Mr. Mohammed has become what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls "homo sacer": a creature legally dead while biologically still alive. And he's not the only one living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law."

...working the schema a different way. Perhaps Žižek intended only to advertise the work of his colleague, arch antimaterialist Giorgio Agamben. Here, a tangible problem concerning institutional inconsistancies is given a fantastic solution. To the reader perhaps inclined to query this line of reasoning, references are duly produced (Agamben: homo sacer). This referencing is important because Žižek here can only hint at the properly opaque style of his books.

(the apparent legal problem stated above is in fact soluble: in US law evidence extracted by the state under torture is inadmissible)

Again what's suggested is a version of structuralism; and this is what's important for the newspaper. Because it allows the reader to suppose there's (so to speak) another level of discourse above that of the newspaper, authorising and correcting what the newspaper has already said.

The affectivity of structuralism is built around the logic of (pre whig era) conservatism. Structuralism isn't selling conservatism but it does dramatically ask: what if conservatism is after all reasonable? It restates the idea of a mysterious quasi-divine social order, not as the basis of political commitment but as a horrifying possibility undermining political commitment. It's surely of a piece with the vague politics of the middle class; predicated on a worried sort of liberalism. But again it's not too far from conservatism proper, which was always an orthodoxy of absent arguments; the arguments of conservatives being nearly always bad (there's also a relation to masochism).

The tendancy of the newspaper reader to countenance every kind of insult, albeit to only a small degree, probably derives his everyday use of two incompatible forms of argument:

1. ordinary arguments from experience

2. "reverse induction" arguments such as are required to understand newspapers*

but it truly is only the middle classes whose permanent tutelary role allows them to dream so profoundly the bureaucratisation of all social practice.

* i.e. what I later call arguments based on "naturalistic-inductive" logic

symptômas

a new survey asserts! a new survey asserts!

Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that the philosopher lives under the sign of the intellect, as the prostitute lives under the sign of sex. The popularity of books such as those by Slavoj Žižek suggests that the bourgeois consumer often feels he lives under the sign of his mysterious pathology.

The consumer base in this country consists predominantly of a single class of petty functionaries, who, though they do not own the means of production, are permitted to call themselves bourgeois, or, if they are not permitted to speak, may feel ashamed in the name of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders have followed their gods in ceasing to speak to them directly. Their society is dominated topographically by capitalism and culturally by hearsay.

The vogue for a repackaged psychoanalysis, a psychanalysis cut into bits and redistributed through magazines, surely derives from the bourgeois consumer's horror and fascination with his own image as it appears distorted in the commodity spectacle. Ceaseless pronouncements on the abstract necessity of every aspect of his life, along with the miserable condition of this life, undoubtedly suggests to him that it is his own psyche, the centre of his universe, that is in really riddled with neuroses.

Capitalist mass culture, though hegemonic, is nearly always presented as something subsidiary, or marginal, as if some alternative existed. This ersatz marginality derives from its reproduction through the commodity system. Life is seen to circulate around an absent dominant. The counterpart of this discourse in topography is airport architecture: transit without destination. The reproduction of social roles tends also to the reproduction of marginality. There is no reason for these roles to be consistant with a conscious totality of life. Society takes on the character of the workplace. The psychoneurotic imagination serves to compliment and otherwise explain life as an endless series of preludes to living.

(intertitles for a silent film)

heuristics

Here's a story about television:

It's possible that the history of television does represent (though perhaps not in Badiou's sense,) the process of a truth; that intelligibility can operate without any particular context. The effect of commodity reproduction on the content of television, especially on advertising (where a lot of innovations were made), has been the erosion of those elements borrowed from other artforms that have proved unnecessary for the continued reproduction of television. Television has abandoned the contextualisation still found in theatre. In George Trow's phrase it presents The Context of No Context. Television almost invents, for its viewers, a second heuristics, required to understand or gain pleasure from its evolved form: a new science of interpretation. It's theatre disembowelled by the effects of competitive markets.

Instead of establishing the relevant, in relation to an established culture, television sets up a proxy context, or, more precisely, the viewer learns to construct a proxy context from habitually televisual television. A proxy context is formed by attributing, to an abstracted situation, interests or desires to whose antithetical struggle the situation relates. Television very often chronicles changes to a situation without describing this situation. The viewer learns to understand this (and of course it doesn't extirpate their normal thinking), but this system of heuristics, prompted by television, is strictly speaking illogical, and probably ends up exerting some influence on real life. The viewer is defined by an abstract necessity, a necessity without an object. And this apparent contradiction offers another angle of attack for advertising.

(All this probably dates back further, to the first mass produced newssheets. I'm tempted to date it to the point when Novalis decides to animate, as it were, Fichte's non I.)

Today's newspapers* actually do have something relevant to say, you have to skip to the respective entertainment sections to see this sort of effect. But there's some of this in Mr Blair's resignation: a discourse built around an imaginary consensus, completely divorced from the politics to which Mr Blair has directly contributed.

*i.e. the newspapers of 27th June 2007: the day of Mr Blair's resignation.