GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The thinking behind my most recent post was that the possibility of a systemic collapse of the contemporary market/democratic system can’t be discounted; that if such a collapse takes place life will nevertheless continue: people will need food, shelter, power, etc., and they will enter into economic relations in order to meet those needs, and political and cultural relations so as to define and preserve the relationships they enter into; and that, therefore, it is helpful to think about the kinds of dispositions and capacities that might be exercised in anticipation of that possibility, and exercised in such a way as to simultaneously minimize said possibility but to restore some new normalcy as quickly as possible afterwards. In others words, I was proposing thinking on the margins of the current system, in the shadow of its possible demise, for both diagnostic and prescriptive purposes.

There is another reason to take up the question, though, and that is the growing difficulty the differing factions in American life will have living together. Some kind of separation, embedded in differing ways of life, of the factions from each other, might be the best alternative to civil war. The story of 20th century American society and politics has been the rise of Progressivist assumptions—i.e., the assumption that modern life was too complex to allow for its management by private agencies and spontaneous forms of order and needed, therefore, to be turned over to scientific experts. Freedom was a source of chaos and conflict on a level incompatible with an advanced technological civilization and must give way to a largely planned (and ultimately transnational) order. The attempts by an insurgent conservative movement, through the 80s-00s, to resist the installation of this order (based upon the alliance between big government and big business), have only succeeded in slowing it down, and that only temporarily. It seems to me clear, though, first, that Progessivism has reached its limits, that is, it generates more resentments than it can recirculate, and it now threatens to swallow up the market order upon which is has been merely parasitic so far; second, that its adherent are nevertheless determined to continue pushing through to the definitive and irreversible establishment of that order, by any means necessary—indeed, they can’t imagine a life worth living under any other order; third, that a majority of Americans wish to retain the benefits, real and perceived, granted to them by that order, without supporting its continued expansion; fourth, that the wishes of this majority cannot be met, since progressivism must continue to grow or wither away; and, fifth, that a growing minority of Americans are coming to feel that they can’t live under the Progressive order at all, even in its present form, and that they must resist, at all costs, its further expansion.

It is that last observation that decisively changes the equation. I would estimate the number of hard core progressives in the U.S at 15-20%, but they are very heavily concentrated in high influence arenas (media, education, many sectors of big business and, of course, government) and are in close contact with and receive significant support from their international equivalents. I would estimate the number of Americans who will have had it with progressivism by the time this President and this democratic majority will have shown us everything they have at something like 20-25%. If the majority interested in some version of current arrangements could constitute a genuine center, those rough edges could be smoothed out; but if they can’t, then it is the polarity that will drive events. That is the way things look to me.

It would be easy to dismiss talk of civil strife, much less civil war, as hyperbolic, but I have a very specific scenario in mind: the progressives must institute their agenda nationally and internationally, and it must do so through a solid phalanx of laws and bureaucracies, and those laws must ultimately be enforced. In the end, it doesn’t matter if this is done by an overtly progressive administration and legislature or covertly and gradually through the armies of unelected and permanent judges and administrators who are controlled by no administration and have only the most distant relationship to laws (which, increasingly, do little more than empower those very administrators to enforce some “mandate”)—it will be seen through even in the latter case. We are already almost at the point where progressives insist upon arresting citizens for actions that the latter consider to fall wholly within their legitimate rights (perhaps we passed the point a while ago, but I don’t want to enter into too many controversies here); we are almost certain to get to the point where constitutionalists feel compelled to make a point of forcing them to do so and progressives will in turn feel compelled to make a special point of complying—and resistance will be organized, fairly rapidly and surprisingly effectively, I think. (I’m still thinking of that remarkable “Green Police” commercial during the Super Bowl! But also of the harassment of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant by the Human Rights commission in Canada, the current trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands—and much else.) It’s hard to say how the police and army (the men with the guns) will fall out in the event—nagging grandmothers who don’t want gay pastors rather than battling violent criminals might seem awfully tempting to a lot of them, but many will feel ashamed and wish to return to defending the innocent against the violent. And we should also consider that all this will be taking place in the context of what I assume will be an extended and increasingly grave recession, perhaps depression.

The secessionism I am exploring, then, is also aimed at providing an alternative to such a confrontation, and at ensuring that such a confrontation, if it turns out to be inevitable, is resolved as quickly, peacefully and, of course, successfully as possible.

To put it yet another way, I am practicing what the theorist of nuclear warfare (and how will that play into all this?) Herman Kahn called “thinking the unthinkable”—perhaps that’s the most authentic mode of originary thinking, since the unthinkable is what must have first of all have been glimpsed for our first ancestors to have put forth the life-saving sign.

At a certain point in thinking through the question of “gay marriage” I realized that there was a way out of the double bind the victimary continually, and usually successfully, impose upon the normal. I am far from being the only observer who has recognized that there is much more to the demand for gay marriage than its proponents claim. The argument proceeds on two levels: one, the privileges granted to married people, with regard to inheritance, joint property, sharing of insurance plans, visitation rights should one partner be hospitalized, and so on; two, the implicit denial of recognition in the refusal to grant “full equality” to gays. But the privileges could be addressed through changes in contract law—changed more quickly and easily, and in a way that would benefit lots of other people who might like to create less conventional arrangements with non-relatives. It is, then, the “recognition” that is really at stake here, but (here comes the double bind) the problem is that recognition of “full equality” of gays brings along with it a whole panoply of “rights” that cut deeply into private spheres of life and the liberties we still take for granted: to mention just two, the rights of religious institutions to privilege traditional marriage can now be read in terms identical to the refusal to allow black members, treat black patients, etc.; second, and even more ominously, with the creeping advance of “hate speech” laws (and let’s keep in mind that they have already crept along much further in much of the West than here), it will conceivably become possible to criminalize dissent from gay marriage, make promotion of gay marriage (and relationships more generally) mandatory in educational institutions, and so on. Gay marriage, it is easy to conclude, is more about this totalitarian agenda than any marginal benefits it will provide a few gay people.

So, the way out: take marriage out of the hands of the state altogether—return it to the religious institutions and private contractual arrangements. If a church, synagogue or mosque wants to marry gay couples, let them; and let anyone else who distributes benefits or provides access to goods based upon marital status recognize what they want to. In that case, the victory of gay activists (which seems to me, if not quite inevitable, extremely likely) would be a Pyrrhic one—in other words, just abandon the fort, take the supplies, and set up camp elsewhere. So, the question this conclusion raises is whether the same approach is possible in other institutions or all institutions—given that the entire Leftist project depends upon capturing national and global institutions and re-engineering them so that they can penetrate ever more deeply into all areas of life, could we just leave the victimary Left a shell which it is unable to make any use of?

Let me pursue this from another angle. A discussion with a friend of mine about the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate political spending reminded me that if one had to identify the single issue most important to the Left, in the US at least, it might very be campaign finance reform—more specifically, public financing of campaigns (leading, inevitably, to the exclusion of all private financing—i.e., the closing of “loopholes”). I always found it interesting, when I myself was on the Left, that discussions about other policies always seemed to go back to discussions about campaign finance, but the reason is not hard to find. The people would really support equality, redistribution of wealth, the socialization of “essential” services, the destruction of traditional values, etc., if they really understood what these ends would do for them; but they can never come to understand that as long as their thinking is muddled and distorted by “corporate” influences, who are (presumably) advantageously positioned so as to advance their ideology. Hence, leveling the playing field of political speech comes first—even more, any failure on the part of the people to accept the agenda of the Left can be interpreted as evidence of insufficient leveling—corporate influence must still be sneaking through, there must be more loopholes to close, etc. From arguments over principles and policies the Left can thereby situate itself on the more comfortable terrain of the infinitely regressive tainting of our entire political arena.

But that’s not what I want to talk about now. In the wake of these reflections, I asked myself: what, if I could narrow it down to one single issue, would I most want to change now, as a way of opening up the possibilities I would like to see flourish? What could it all come back to on my side? When I had my answer, I felt the need to start writing this post, and the answer is: the abolition of the IRS. The IRS is the single most tyrannical and unaccountable institution in our society, and the tax code it enforces the single most powerful support of virtually all the deviations from genuine republican government we suffer from: corporate handouts and Congressional pork and loot for lobbyists and government micro-management of our decisions regarding health care, housing, schooling, the elevation of experts as authorities, etc. Getting rid of the IRS, whether by radically simplifying the tax code, or by abolishing the income tax altogether, would immediately and dramatically increase our freedom. So, public financing of campaigns vs. the abolition of the IRS—these seems to me a helpful pair of dueling icons, reducing the Left-Right struggle to its basic components.

But abolishing the IRS would itself involve passing laws, and therefore garnering public support, lobbying, overcoming other lobbyists, working the media, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the idea (or fantasy) of abolishing the IRS is about the maximal generation of spaces free of the government (and the consequent reduction of government and politics to essentials). Is there a way to cut out the middleman, and start building sustainable institutions independent of government and capable of resisting the encroachments of the government? If the answer is no, it seems to me unlikely that constitutional republics (and, more broadly, the market order) has any future; so why not proceed as if the answer is yes? Perhaps abolishing the IRS could be seen as a by-product or index of this other work of circumventing the government—unlike the Left, which must continually legitimize the centralization of power while turning that power to its own purposes, constitutionalists can represent the resentment of the center by dispersing themselves outside of and to some extent within institutions tied to the government.

Here is the question, put bluntly: could we build schools or networks of schooling drawing completely upon private donations and tuition and therefore capable of rejecting government dictates tied to government funding—not only on the elementary level, but all the way through university and even graduate and professional study? And would the graduates of those schools (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) get hired by private businesses or clients, who would in turn be willing to sign waivers exempting their transactions from government interference? Could private courts be established to adjudicate disputes that might otherwise spill over into the public court system? What about hospitals? Pharmaceutical companies that eschew FDA approval and only deal with customers who waive said approval, accepting internal studies and agreed upon third party investigations in their place? New forms of currency? To what extent could lawsuits insisting upon the rights to such arrangements help to create the necessary space for their emergence, and to what extent would stealth and civil disobedience be necessary? Once a critical mass of such institutions emerged, it would be possible to negotiate with the government over, for example, the right to withdraw tax dollars to institutions which no longer have one’s consent—including, I would be willing to say, the military. The days of the US as a superpower and world police are coming to an end, and we might as well start to think about the military as more of an expeditionary force, focusing, if we retain enough collective sanity, on deterrence and protective measures like missile defense and stricter controls on visa issuance.

At a certain point, as state governments and ultimately the federal government go bankrupt, as victimary discourse makes free speech ever more impossible in the dominant social institutions, as the police, as suggested by a prescient ad in the recent Super Bowl, come to find it more appealing to harass those who buy the wrong light bulbs, drive insufficiently green cars, fail to separate their garbage correctly, exceed their allotted portion of monthly energy, etc., than chasing and combating actual criminals—at a certain point the effort will have to be made. In fact, I see the current rebellion of the Tea Partiers, as encouraging as that is, and as much as I enjoy the discomfiture of the Democrats and the interruption of their sparagmos, less as a vehicle for turning us back to genuine constitutionalism and more as the beginning of the realization that there’s no longer any point to asking the government to let us be free men and women. The Democrats over-reached, and placed their entire agenda, in all its hideousness, before the public, which understandably recoiled; but there is no constituency for reversing the welfare state, and no means of resisting the gradual creep of socialism through the judiciary and bureaucracy. And, if I’m wrong, the marginalist politics I propose could easily enter the “slipstream” of a new constitutionalism—I am suggesting, though, that if we are even to be ready for that, we must operate under the assumption that that won’t be an option. One way or another, the many tens of millions of Americans who will find it imperative to resist the new order—which they will now be able to recognize in more subtle, post-Obamian forms—will find some way of doing so.

New ways of living would be accompanied by new ways of thinking and speaking. And they would be new—the idioms of traditionalism would likely enter the new idioms, but they wouldn’t dominate them. Predicting the form and content of new idioms is impossible, but we can expect and contribute to new vocabularies of exchange, contracting, covenanting, gifting and pledging: new indicators of trust and reciprocity. We can present our difference from what our rulers would have us be as the default position, and try to formalize any act of consent to one or another dictate—as if a choice on both sides of the transaction is being made (and if I refuse, a choice would have to be made whether to arrest me, to pursue prosecution—a series of choices none of them pre-dictated). We can remove from our discourses all assumptions of a “mainstream” or “consensus,” assumptions which are deeply rooted in the most casual conversations. Whatever is living, enjoying and loving is interesting, and resentment is interesting as well because it disperses and distances and thereby creates new spaces; what is not so interesting is desire, which is characterized above all by its impatience with the difference between signs and things and, finally, its hostility to the very scenes which make it possible. Mistakes are very interesting, because they provide the opportunity to forgive, instruct and be instructed, and to discover, over and over again, what kind of normal we inhabit and wish to sustain. Mistakes are the deepest sources of innovation—we might catch the habit of treating desires that grab hold of their objects themselves as mistakes, as if the Gnostic revolutionaries just got lost on their way to some new idiom and stumbled into the conflation of desire and reality, as any of us might in our more child-like moments. And if White Guilt is the guilt of the unmarked towards the marked, we can let ourselves be marked by our mistakes and wait for others to come along and unmark us by locating our mistake within a new idiom.

Obama is from the 80s Left, not the 60s; I’m not sure how much difference that makes, but it makes some, and seems to be worth a brief post.

The 60s Left was actually quite diverse, unpredictable, and free—it was also plenty sexist and “homophobic,” and was much more opposed to the liberals in power than to the then negligible conservative opposition. Someone like Alexander Cockburn is a remnant of that Left—Marxist, always ready to defend to Stalinism and attack capitalists venomously, but also virulently opposed to any kind of elitism and therefore ready to dismiss the Global Warming cult and tweak critics of Sarah Palin. Similarly, Camille Paglia is someone who explicitly wants to expand the cultural revolution of the 60s, in part by adamantly refusing to obey any taboos of any sect whatsoever—Paglia has forcefully defended Palin, while remaining an Obama supporter.

But there are very few such figures left—the 80s Left has gobbled them up, with their own consent for the most part. The 80s Left is the consolidated Left: reunited with establishment Liberalism as a result of the wars on Nixon and then Reagan, doctrinally unified around the notion of “diversity,” and safely ensconced in the liberal institutions of the media, entertainment and academy. Here’s what the 80s Left sounds like: Obama, during the campaign, was asked about the possibility of military intervention to stop the genocide in Darfur; he responded (I’m quoting from memory here) that “that’s not what the people who care about Darfur think needs to be done.” That marks the idiom perfectly—first, the deference to those who have their bureaucratic bill in the water and have appropriated the issue; second the reference to those who have made what is in essence a successful political land grab as “those who care about…” The 80s Left got all of reality covered: there are people “caring” about everything now, and they can issue the authoritative word on the environment, race, peace, the UN, and so on. Look at Obama’s repeated, casual and presumably definitive references to “experts” in his exchange with House Republicans last Friday—those are people who care about health care, and have the last word.

The 80s Left was unified by its feigned terror at a single boogeyman: the “backlash.” That was its political innovation: to define all resistance to, and the minimal rollback of, its political agenda as the result of a (white, male, homophobic, redneck, etc.) backlash. That the “backlashers” had not, in fact, changed their views but were simply resisting reckless and mindless innovations of the last couple of decades was irrelevant—the point was to situate the Left as the new “Reality,” against which all resistance was a bitter, destructive and imminently violent assault on “History.” The backlash is by definition illegitimate, even when they control the Presidency and Congress—the “mainstream” press should, if at all possible, not even pay attention to their doings, except in the manner of a police blotter; if their words are to be quoted, they must be thoroughly smothered in “commentary” and placed in the proper “context.”

This is all worth mentioning because it accounts perfectly for Obama and his supporters’ reflex reaction to the massive opposition that has emerged over the past year: their response, whether it be to FOX News, the Republican Party, or the Tea Partiers, has been governed completely by the logic of the backlash to the backlash. Obama still seems incapable of granting reality to these forces—they are nothing more than noise which is interfering with the clear transmission of his message. It seems to me that this explains their extremely limited and self-defeating political strategy, and suggests that they are unlikely to become more flexible in the future. What worked for graduate students bullying their less ideologically belligerent fellow students and professors won’t work for a country of 300 million (still) free individuals.

Exclude from your discourse all imperatives, implicit and explicit, to third parties. No “x must realize,” or “y needs finally to understand,” or “we have to demand that z…” Nobody really has to do anything, and stating that they do simply establishes a fantasy scenario in which others come to occupy the same scene as you and recognize the same center. Note that imperative directed towards the second party, i.e., the reader or interlocutor, are perfectly acceptable under this rule—as long as the imperative is fulfilled in actions that can be taken by that interlocutor alone, like “exclude from your discourse…” Think about how ridiculous so many of those implicit imperatives would be if stated in the first person singular—if, say, “we must hold the Democrats accountable for their unconscionable over-spending” were to be imagined as someone standing (where? In front of “the Democrats”? who have been lined up to hear this proclamation how?) and saying “I hold you accountable”—but what is a performative, like an imperative or judgment, that can’t be stated in the first person before the intended recipient? An imperative to the reader, on the other hand, can remain within the bounds of the imperative: try speaking in this way. It can, of course, be rejected. The other alternative is to write or speak in indicatives, implicit as well as explicit, and lay down some chain of events that might articulate the thing being said or written with someone else doing something else. I think this constraint would be very helpful—it seems to me that we hardly ever hear, from either politicians or journalists, “if…then…” chains which can sustain the insertion of indefinite “if… then” chains between each “if” and “then.” If the Democrats pass the health care bill they will alienate those who would have their health care and/or insurance arrangements put at risk (in the following ways…) along with those whose taxes would be raised and those who could not afford to sustain their businesses under such mandates; the Republicans would then have a constituency for running on overturning the health care bill which would in turn alienate those who would find the accusation that they have thereby taken away coverage from x number of people persuasive, meaning that the Republicans would weigh these respective constituencies, which might, in turn, “present” differently to different Republicans, who would therefore negotiate amongst themselves. No one “must” do anything in this kind of discourse—everyone is simply confronted with choice after choice, with each choice generated a new series, which we can anticipate and formulate as mimetic, speaking beings. Even with larger questions, phrases like, “we must defend the basic principles of the American constitution” or “Western civilization” collapse in the same way under closer inspection. In a sense, what I am arguing is that the legal notion of “standing” is far more important than “logic”—I can speak to an injury done me, I can answer an accusation made against me, and while I can’t “defend Western civilization” (like my example of “holding Democrats accountable,” try to picture “defending Western civilization”), but I can certainly shore up a concept or exemplify a way of thinking that might give some others an imperative to repeat to themselves when they have the chance to speak to an injury done to themselves or another, or to answer an accusation, including one addressed to one of their corporate identities.

We all know Marshall McLuhan’s catchphrases: “the medium is the message,” “global village,” “the content of one medium is another medium,” etc. I don’t know of any theory of media that has superseded McLuhan’s, a vulgarized version of which has become a kind of cultural commonsense; and yet it’s hard to take McLuhan completely seriously. I suspect that the problem lies in the prophetic rhetoric—a similar problem interferes with my taking someone like Emerson (undoubtedly an influence on McLuhan) completely seriously either—which almost never ages well. You read McLuhan and expect the world around you to change almost instantaneously; then you realize that the text you are reading is half a century old and maybe things haven’t changed all that much after all. Or, maybe they’ve changed so much that you don’t notice the change since the reference point against which you might measure it has vanished (I find it hard to imagine not doing all my writing on the computer and gathering all my news over the internet even though I know actually did work and live otherwise, and not all that long ago). One thing I am certain of, though: to the extent that the global village McLuhan saw coming into being exists it is constituted by hatred of the U.S. and Israel. In other words, desire and resentment lie deeper than any media, and so does the difficult historical work of channeling and shaping them through institutions; in yet other words, the problem with McLuhan is that if he has any anthropology it is a kind of mystical, Gnostic one: to say that media are the extensions of our organs and senses is to imagine a single “Man,” in relation to whom all the individual men and women and the relations between them are mere epiphenomena.

Once we allow for that, though, it seems to me that McLuhan is a perfectly good starting point for an originary theory of media. Instead of saying that the media are extensions of the senses and organs, why not modify that to read extensions of the originary gesture? We could then give some precision to McLuhan’s vague notion of the content of one medium being another medium—that sounds right, especially when we throw in a few intuitive examples (the content of writing is speech; the content of movies is the novel, etc.), but I think that notion would break down if we tried to burden it with the tasks a serious theory of media would have to take on. What do we mean, after all, by “content”? McLuhan doesn’t say, leaving us with a commonplace of literary criticism. But what if “content” is simply those objects, or more broadly, “fields” (what I call fields of semblances) that have been produced in tandem with a particular medium but that draw upon mimetic tensions that can no longer be deferred within that medium? We would then be able to set aside the teleology and utopianism of McLuhan’s account: writing may not have been invented to defer rivalries that speech no longer could, but once it had been invented in some form, for whatever purposes, it could be put to work serving the new hierarchical orders that needed not only bureaucracies but forms of legitimacy that the permanence of writing and the exclusiveness of its knowledge could provide. And, of course, there need not be only one set or kind of rivalry involved—the more the new medium spread, the more uses that would be found for it.

Part of McLuhan’s point, though, is that we don’t simply use media—they transform us. In originary terms, though, this means they create new arenas of desire and resentment. What McLuhan calls “cool” and “hot” media need, I think, to be reconsidered in these terms. The hot media are those that provide a lot of data and hence produce passivity in the audience—like a Rembrandt painting, for example; the cool media provide little data and hence require extensive audience participation—like a Klee drawing. And McLuhan doesn’t apply the terms simplistically—he realizes that “heat” and “coolness” depend upon the total media environment—so, radio is much “hotter” when introduced into the largely oral world of post-colonial societies than in the literate West. But it is nevertheless very strange to hear TV described as a cool medium, since it has for as long as I know (and this must have been the case when McLuhan was writing) been caricatured as the most passive medium around, producing nothing but couch potatoes. Perhaps McLuhan could have dismissed this as a literary prejudice, but looking back at TV from the 50s to the 90s—with its extraordinarily limited genres, conventions and formulas—from the standpoint of today’s world of interactive and interfolding media, isn’t that “prejudice” amply confirmed? Didn’t TV shows succeed by saturating their viewers with “data”—the data of its narrative conventions and stereotypes, but also that embodied in the invariably maintained stage/spectator point of view?

It seems to me, rather, that “cool” and “hot” name different types of desire, desires that are conducted by media entering societies at give historical junctures. “Hot” desires are those for exclusive control over precisely delineated objects, “cool” desires are for sharing and communion with others. For McLuhan, the hot media are the ones that lead to specialization (print leads to the heightening of vision, and a very specific kind of vision, closely linked to interiority), while the cool media are more eclectic. But books can play into pedagogical relations in various ways, can be tied to various forms of orality and collectivity more or less closely, and so on. I suppose War and Peace would be as hot as you can get within the hot medium of print, but only for those who can perceive all the levels of data the book organizes—for a semi-literate reader today, it might not be very different from reading Finnegan’s Wake—the intense interiority and desire to leave the village and family and enter the market as an individual has given way to a vast array of possible linkages and desires within an advanced market. Nor does McLuhan seem very interested in the market—along with work, and money (which he does see as an important medium), he seems to take for granted that the market will disappear in the instantaneity produced by the new media.

But I can’t see that media studies, however privileged a field in today’s academy, has advanced much beyond McLuhan’s propheticism—it has been taken over by victimary forces on one side (and annexed to “cultural studies”) and by the arid discourses (highly specialized and hence crippled forms of literacy, we might say in McLuhan’s terms) in the social sciences on the other side. It has probably become an excuse for not advancing an anthropology, because, after all, what would be the content of an anthropology if “man” is nothing more than his extensions or various forms of “outering”? So, one is left with descriptions, either impressionistic or positivistic (through the use of polls, surveys, etc.) of the various “effects” of various media on something like “ideology,” “social roles” or “power relations.”

So, let’s turn inward, first, and apply McLuhan’s terms to originary grammar, and move outwards penetrating his analysis of the media with originary thinking. The content of the ostensive is some dangerous mimetic convergence; the content of the imperative is the inappropriate ostensive; the content of the declarative what we might call a suspended imperative—the imperative which is not fulfilled, which is prolonged into the interrogative, which is not enforced but nevertheless not retracted, which is held in reserve pending the presentation of a reality in which the resentment of the center can disperse the desires concentrating in that imperative. In each case, “material” would be a better word than “content,” since nothing is simply contained here—something is not only reshaped, but reshaped so as to reverse or divert its original aim; nor is the form contained in the content—that is, the ostensive did not “inevitably” give rise to the imperative, nor the imperative to the declarative; rather, in each case we see a improvisation, an invention, or even simply an error that serendipitously gives rise to the new form.

A more promising approach to thinking about the media, then, might be to correlate different articulations of media with different articulations of grammar—so, not print and radio, and TV and the internet, but print, say, as it restructures its environment in the move to the computer keyboard, in a space bounded by the migration of visual media to the computer, a still vibrant radio, and so on. The author Ronald Sukenick did a lot of thinking and experimenting with the implications of writing in a multi-media environment, for example in terms of breaking with the Gutenbergian convention of straight lines of homogeneous print going straight down the page. The question for writing, then, would be how to import ostensive elements into a primarily declarative medium, and to do so in order to strengthen rather than vitiate its fundamentally declarative character. Rather than a new unified sensibility, we would have the spontaneous organization of competition and reciprocal appropriation between and within the media, which originary thinkers could speak about in terms of interpenetrating ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative fields.

Of course, what we would most wish to bring such analyses to bear upon would be the electronic media—how primitive the TV now appears in this new world of constantly circulating video and print, how ineffectual its traditional organization through the large “networks” now appear! I suppose most of us will continual to watch TV, and there is still a huge gap between the shows produced by professionals and what amateurs would be capable of (there are some very good shows today, probably better than there have ever been), but it’s hard to see how long the current system of production and distribution can continue, now that you can watch pretty much any show you want whenever you want and for free. It seems hardly worthwhile to waste the energy on analyzing TV shows in terms of their cultural “meaning” or “impact”—“Seinfeld” was probably the last “important” show, or at least the last important scripted one.

In the political economy of signs, then, we would perhaps look for which entrepreneurs can conquer territory within the division of labor by introducing an ostensive or imperative dimension to a primarily declarative medium; or a declarative overlay to a primarily ostensive or imperative medium. The conservative media seems to me particularly advanced in this regard, with its dense network of TV (FOX), talk radio, blogs, websites like Pajamas Media, Hot Air, and Breitbart’s sites, which all interact and intersect with each, deploy all the media and all the resources of all the media, are populated by a core of personalities and thinkers who move from one site to another while continually bringing on board new voices. It is tight enough to be coherent and open enough to allow for lively debates and to prevent the creation of a “bubble” that would filter out unwelcome or unanticipated news from the world. It is an enormously effective way of producing events, and the content of events is nothing other desires given enough scope to make a shared object visible, resentments organized so as to make that object divisible and available, and at least the possibility of love for an inexhaustible source of presence embodied in a sign.

The media today interact with each other at an unprecedented rate and under the control of individual users to an extent unimaginable even ten years ago: I can watch a cable news show, down load a clip, set it to music, change the words of the song so as to make the modified song a parody of the figure discussed in the news clip, place that remixed video on YouTube and have hundreds of commentators discussing it and thousands of users circulating it—all within a couple of hours. (Well, I can’t do it—but plenty of people can.) And the whole sequence may very well end up a topic of discussion on that very news show the next day. The content of one media event, then, is another media event, and the most eventful events are the ones that do the most translating of the terms of one media into another. Circulating last year was a video which somehow had Congress members singing their speeches (the voice was maintained and the words kept the same—they were somehow “made” to sing), giving the debate the appearance of an opera; right now “The Day Obamacare Died” “Sung by Barack Obama” is making the rounds—just about any of us could think of a dozen examples. What is privileged in such productions is a particular characteristic of sign use—the ability to stretch one form so as to accommodate an unfamiliar content, or to modify a set of rules so as to lead to a very different set of results, to let one domain of culture comment upon another. I think these are the aspects of sign use most closely tied to human freedom, or, perhaps, those aspects that guarantee freedom’s ineradicability. This is not to deny that more traditionally “real” events (a terrorist attack, a financial crash) can break through these intricate intermedial “ecosystems” and redirect the attention of those systems beyond the power of media entrepreneurs to interrupt. But we may have gotten to the point where those who have not acquired fluency in “intermedia” will be increasingly ill-equipped to address those crises when they break through and must, in turn, be assimilated to the ecosystem.