on semiotic phantoms

(which i would rather have forgotten about)

“All those contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms…” –William Gibson in: Mirrorshades

–Take a moment to consider that phrase: semiotic phantoms. I’m beginning to think the Twentieth Century can be explained by nothing else; that our term “ideology”, far from referring to any sort of reasoned system, describes rather the simple prevalence of such phantoms that, once expected, punctually make their appearance. I have examined all the books that purport to contain ideological systems, in search of a definitive solidity, but found nothing but immense heaps of patches. The phenomena came first & every objection of common sense had to be dealt with, as it naturally arose. Patches, & still more patches! The phenomena were sacrosanct. Here is a true koan: why is it easier to believe some things than others? (You know, the first time it was raised, they made him drink fucking hemlock.) And i’m still looking for the counter-koan: what do you do to make someone stop believing something they believe in just because it makes them feel good?

Like maybe: WAIT THREE HUNDRED YEARS.

I don’t want to hear another person talk about the NeoCons as if they had managed to give intellectual rigor to their politics of bigotry & superstition. They are anti-intellectuals who read, but that doesn’t make them intellectuals; if you read for the sole purpose of justifying your prejudices, that makes you an anti-intellectual. (Something the Right has no monopoly on, to be sure.) And it’s mostly their “semiotic phantoms” which have infested the present landscape, & caused so much grief & havoc by the stupid things people do who believe in them.

Do you want an example? What about this thing they call “reality television”? It’s actually games played with non-professional actors, of course; & only as real as the cameramen & the editors of the raw footage care to present. But what is the idea that it propagates? That none of us is any better than the most venal, self-serving humans they can scrape up. That ALL PEOPLE, EVERYWHERE will do ANYTHING for money. How very useful a belief for the architects of empire! This semiotic phantom, which properly should be called “Normalcy = Moral Squalor”, although the people who harbor it would consider it a solacing & sometimes amusing adult-realism, was at one time the exclusive possession of pirates & robber barons, & heartily condemned by the majority of people who knew in their bones that a society is based on reciprocity & acceptance of civil duties, as much as it is on public buildings & infrastructure. And i don’t even now think that it has become the belief of a majority of Americans…

Listen. I was just reading in Counterpunch an excellent article on Things You Can Do Against the Republicans. But little by little something started nagging at me, till at last i had to stop in disgust. It was steeped in a certain class-illusion, one i was born to & cannot wholly abjure, that i have to characterize to myself as the “Periclean Bourgeoisie Syndrome”. It has to do with one’s sense of personal empowerment, of the sphere of action possible to a person of your station in life. If i had been born otherwise, i know it would be utterly impossible for me to believe in some of the things i have, such as “you can be anything you want to be” & “what matters is what’s inside you”… Not that it’s not a good thing to want to always tell the truth, for example, believing that this is in all situations the route to an optimal outcome. But even the most privileged slave of Pericles himself could have told you that dissembling is required to the precise extent that there is inequity in personal power. (I would have made a bad slave.)

I think of a certain scene in the remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair”, when Pierce Brosnan is out racing his million-dollar sailboat with another rich man. Then he wrecks it on purpose, just for the hell of it. This is a portrait of American politics. Once i cheered, because the sailboat of “my team” won. Does this mean i really have a boat of my own in the race? You could say this is cynical, because it promotes apathy. My answer is that as a philosopher begins by removing all the false notions before he can ever come up with a new one that is possibly true, you have to give up your class illusions in order to see what kind of action is possible for you in the real world. I WILL be voting in 2004. But not to salve my conscience!

So, what does a real “blow for freedom” look like? What about that anonymous casino employee who broke the story of William Bennett’s gambling addiction? Damage control can try all it can, but he’s never going to be as shiny as he was before. And there’s a certain blogger in Iraq, who i think has accomplished more than any other figure on the Internet (except maybe Michael Moore–): simply by being what he is. A human being, who happened to be born in Iraq… And how different these things are, from the idea of asking complete strangers for money, till you’ve accumulated enough to build your own million-dollar sailboat–that the officials probably won’t let you run in the race anyway.

(2003)