If repression has the role, in cybernetic capitalism, of forestalling the event, prediction is its corollary, insofar as it is for the purpose of eliminating the uncertainty thatâs associated with any future. It is the major concern of the statistical technologies. Whereas those of the welfare State were completely focused on the anticipation of risks, calculated or not, those of cybernetic capitalism aim at multiplying the domains of responsibility. The discourse concerning risk is the driver for deploying the cybernetic hypothesis; it is circulated first and then internalized. Because risks are more easily accepted if those exposed to them have the impression they have chosen to take them, feel responsible for them and, furthermore, feel that they have the power to control and master them themselves. But, as one expert admits, âzero riskâ does not existâŚBy virtue of its permanence for the system, risk is an ideal tool for promoting new forms of power that favor the increasing hold of security apparatuses on collectives and individuals. It eliminates any question of conflict by the obligatory drawing together of individuals around the management of threats that are supposed to concern everyone in the same way. The argument that THEY want us to accept is the following: greater security goes hand in hand with an increased production of insecurity. And if you think that the insecurity increases as prediction tends to be infallible, thatâs because you are yourself afraid of risks. And if you are afraid of risks, if you donât trust the system to completely control your life, your fear risks being contagious and in fact may present a very real risk of disloyalty to the system. In other words, to be afraid of risks is already to be seen as a risk to society oneself. The imperative of commodity circulation on which cybernetic capitalism is based morphs into a general phobia, a fantasy of self-destruction. The control society is a paranoiac society, something that is clearly confirmed by the proliferation of conspiracy theories within it. Thus every individual is subjectified in cybernetic capitalism as a risky dividual, as the generic enemy of the balanced society
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Itâs been interesting to watch the debate on cop shows and if we should still have them unfold as Iâve been watching The Wire, often considered like the One Woke Cop Show or at least the one that gets closest to how to do this sort of show responsibly compared to like, literally any other cop show in American TV history. (As well as one of the overall Greatest TV Shows of all Time, which it is, but letâs table that for this particular discussion.) And while I agree with that assessment, I still think it falls short in some important ways, and that comes down to the distinction between characters as subjects vs. objects.
This is a term I think that the social media masses often donât really understand. I was really bothered by a post yesterday where an otherwise-astute user, someone who I even follow, asserted in an argument against âanti-shippingâ that you canât âobjectify fictional charactersâ because âthey are already objects.â And once I got over my general frustration of âguys letâs not throw out all of media studies when you donât need to do that to debunk bad arguments,â I realized that I think this is based on a misunderstanding of what these terms mean. âObjectificationâ can mean treating a character like a literal object -- see âthe sexy lamp testâ -- but more generally it means framing a character in a way in which they are someone that is acted on by others, rather than an independent agent. This is why agency is such a big topic (albeit not the be-all end-all, for reasons I and others already gone over ad nauseam) in feminist media studies and other critical media studies.
But subjects/objects also comes down to the basic question of âwho is this story about? From whose perspective are we seeing it? Who are we spending most of our time with?â And also, when weâre talking about visual media: who is the literal visual perspective? Whose eyes do the camera follow? If they donât follow anyone in particular, there are still choices being made about how they frame characters, and how that visual framing gives us a sense of what we should think about them. There are different shots you use if you want to zero in on a particular character vs. show the characters as part of a crowd, and likewise, if you want the audience to feel emotionally close to or alienated from them. This is the basis of the theory of the âgaze,â and why we talk about the âmale gazeâ when weâre talking about cameras zooming in on womenâs body parts instead of framing them the way they would a âsubjectâ character.
But in this case, Iâm talking about narrative âsubjectsâ: that âwho is the story about and whose perspective is it from?â question. (Think about it like subjects and objects in a sentence: if I say âMy dad is going to the storeâ my dad is the subject, the sentence is about him, while the store is the thing that my dad is acting upon in that sentence. Itâs passive, hence why in that sentence I had to use passive voice to describe its role.)
Where I think The Wire falls a bit short is that it still frames the cops as the showâs subject. Sure, it also does this with drug dealers, with the longshoremen in Season 2, with politicians and with middle-school students. And it makes sure that we see some of those cops doing corrupt things, and as everyone has said, the real âmain characterâ of the show is Baltimore and the deeply broken system that chews up even the best-intentioned cops. But who do we actually spend the overall most time with? Whose stories are followed throughout the whole series? Itâs the cops: and itâs mostly the âgood copsâ like McNulty, Lester, Greggs, Bunk etc. The Wire of course, doesnât only show them doing Right Things, but the overall message is to sympathize with them and the way they try to make things right in a broken system.
It does it about as responsibly as it can while still maintaining the genre trappings of a Cop Drama. But idk, it bothers me a little bit that the show still expects us to sympathize with and more importantly, see ourselves in the cops when theyâre doing morally questionable things like wiretapping. That theyâre the closest thing the show has to âmain charactersâ and who we most root for. That so much is spent on the question of âwhat it means to be Good Policeâ when the real answer may be that they just plain donât exist. Even âgood guys trapped in a bad system that spits them outâ may be too generous at this point. Even considering that this show is 12 years old, because itâs not like these problems are new or that someone like David Simon wasnât aware of them.
Per the article I linked on cop shows, Emily VanDerWerff suggests film noir as a good alternative to modern cop shows. The Wire has elements of that, the description of having one or two good cops, particularly that the good ones who do exist canât fight the broken system or its true villains. But (to quote EVDW) âevery other law enforcement officer is either hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly evil, or completely inept (sometimes, theyâre all three)â doesnât apply so much. Most of the cops we follow in The Wire -- the subjects -- are âgood cops.â The thuggish ones are supporting characters and we only spend so much time on their brutality, and rarely get their POV unfiltered through another character. Itâs hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say what it needed to do to cross it, I just know it didnât feel like that for me, and it felt like there was a huge divide between what I saw of The Wire vs. what I know of the real-world Baltimore Police Department.
Of course, you canât really make a horrible cop the subject and make compelling TV without making him at least a little sympathetic. So my thinking was: Maybe the right way to do the next cop show is to not make any of the cops the subjects. Focus more on their targets (not just equally) than you do on the cops themselves. Make them the subjects and the cops the objects. Do what The Wire did in its secondary storylines, but take it to the next level and make them primary.
For consciousness, these abbreviations of signs (words) are in effect the sole vestiges of its continuity, that is to say, they are invented in a sphere where the 'true' and the 'false' necessitates the erroneous representation that something can endure or remain identical (and thus, that there can be an agreement between the invented signs and what they are supposed to designate).
Moreover, this is why the impulses themselves must now signify a coherent 'unity', and their similarity or dissimilarity can be assessed only in relation to a primary unity. This unity will henceforth be the soul of the agent, or its conscience, or its intellect.
In the final analysis, they are qualified as 'passions' insofar as they become an object of the agent's judgment, who considers them only insofar as they affect its unity or cohesion in the absence of such a judgment. They become the passions (or affections) of the 'subject', amd just as the impulses are 'ignorant' of the agent, so the agent interprets the impulses as its own 'propensities', 'tendencies' or inclinations - terms that always concern the representation of an enduring unity, a fixity, a 'summit' that necessarily has slopes.
Pierre Klossowski / Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
Gender nihilism designates a kind of radical agnosticism at the level of (gender) identity; a refusal of the injunction to know what one is, to objectify oneself as knowledge, and to make oneself known; a persistent âno commentâ to the police who surround and suffuse us, and marshal against us a vast array of tactics â promises, threats, insults, lies, seductions, manipulations, forms of violence â to extract a confession. It names a possibility latent within any particular gender position: that of disidentification, of non-identification. Silence too is performative. If gender is in some sense the effect of the repetition of gendered expressions, what is the effect of the repetition of a silence when the question of oneâs gender is posed? It is not an escape. Norms continue to inscribe gendered meanings on the body, to produce modes of embodiment, and to act upon expression. One remains both a relay for and a product of gender as a form of power. It is more like a strike or an act of sabotage, a refusal to function as a site of production for a particular kind of knowledge and an effort to disrupt oneâs normal functioning as a force of productionâŚGender nihilism is disinterested in recognition. Recognition is always ârecognition asâŚâ and therefore remains always conditional: âI recognise you asâŚâ is always conditional on a prior identification, always implies a âbecause you areâŚ,â and always retains the possibility that recognition will be withdrawn if you become something else. The power of recognition is also simultaneously the power of misrecognition and non-recognition, and the goal of recognition, whether demanded or asked for, exposes one permanently to these forms of violence. However forcefully we assert âI amâŚ,â we remain vulnerable to âYou are notâŚ,â âYou are insteadâŚâ Gender nihilism has no positive content. In itself it does not prescribe or recommend any particular way of being in the world. It makes no claims about what it is. If identification is drawing a circle in the sand saying âhere are the things I am, there are the things I am not,â gender nihilism simply lets the circle be washed away by the waves
Alys Rowe, âGender Nihilismâ from What is Gender Nihilism?: A Reader, pg. 321-323, 324-325
this good piece of media critique has a title that makes the reader think it'll be about the bias of news media towards specific candidates or perhaps news mediaâs persistent problems with simply getting the facts straight, two things which are rife in the US press, but it's really about something equally important that i think i've only been able to put words to very recently. this is that news media's coverage of politics is almost always, even in the most apparently-left-leaning major press, is still basically framed by an elitist conception of what "politics" means--not as a participatory, democratic process but as a kind of exercise problem-solving, specifically the problem of how to manage an unruly mass. there are more benign solutions (raise the minimum wage for the poor, powerless, agency-free people) or crueler ones, but both render the great mass of humanity as population to be managed, a buzzing morass in need of constant tending--a foreign object. what's striking about this is that this convinces people--regular people, working class people, people who are the targets of this political management, of the dissipation of dissent--to identify with this elite epistemology (and it really deserves that term--itâs an entire worldview). in Rosenâs well-chosen, caustic words:
Take the most generic âsavviness questionâ there is. One journalist asks another: how will this play with the voters? Listening to that, how will this play with the voters, havenât you ever wanted to shout at your television set, âhey buddy, Iâm a voter! Donât talk about me like Iâm not in the room when Iâm sitting right here watching you.â This is whatâs so odd about savviness as a political style performed for the public. It tries to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders. Under its gaze, other people become objects of political technique. In this sense savviness is an attack on our solidarity with strangers who share the same political space.
this doesn't have any actual bearing on the class, race or gender position of regular people, or their actual social power, but it results in this bizarre phenomenon that i see sometimes as an organizer where, for example, low-income retirees who watch political television a lot will talk about the calculus of balancing the need to cut social security as much as possible with the fact that this is, in one particular man's words, "political suicide". this guy, at the same time, is someone who relies on social security simply to eke out an existence and who, as someone who will staunchly defend his SS check when pushed, is precisely the obstreperous, insatiable, anonymous "lazy dependentâ of the bourgeois imagination. itâs genuinely odd and troubling to see people talk about themselves as quasi-human subjects to be disciplined like this.
[belatedly, i realized that this piece was written by the rather milquetoast liberal Jay Rosen, whom i have often seen saying silly things--this essay is good enough that iâm posting anyways]
Jay Rosen, âWhy Political Coverage is Brokenâ, keynote address at New News 2011 at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/
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