#subjectification

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.

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 media’s 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--it’s an entire worldview). in Rosen’s well-chosen, caustic words:

Take the most generic “savviness question” there is. One journalist asks another: how will this play with the voters? Listening to that, how will this play with the voters, haven’t you ever wanted to shout at your television set, “hey buddy, I’m a voter! Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room when I’m sitting right here watching you.” This is what’s 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 dependent” of the bourgeois imagination. it’s 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 i’m posting anyways]