Notes on the election in outline form, filled in, filled out, as if there were an essay / a conclusion. (Since the early 70s, when I taught a course called "The Year 3000," I always knew Kerry would lose. This is why.)
0. The Republican win was predicted and predictable. Now the infinity of analysis begins, an infinity that has already missed the point. The point is/was that demographics are all that are necessary - not tricks, conundrums. The election was clear from the geography.
1. There is nothing the Democrats might have done 'better.' The country voted its conscience. The country has a conscience, the conscience of the Fatherland, Motherland. The conscience of a country is determined by its constituents and their internal dynamics. This was not an election of issues, but psychoanalytics.
2. Its conscience is founded on a morality-based worldview, which is rural in origin, and relatively rigid. Worldviews are operational; with widespread unemployment, relatively liberal media, Net information explosion, increasing technological generation gaps, a rigid 'hedge around the Torah' keeps good from evil, and separates genders, races, sexual preferences, and others from selves. One keeps to the 'clean and proper body' free of contagion, corrosion, decay from within. The rural landscape is characterized by vast space and intensive information economies (newspapers, radio, etc.) - in relation to church, grange, 4-h, other communalities. The other is present by its absence.
3. 9/ll played a critical role, not only in revealing the extreme vulnerability of the country, but also in the production of an Islamic- fundamentalist alterity that could not be dismissed. Even in the heartland, Islam is visible. New York City, the target, developed a complex response within a mixed demographics; the heartland reaffirmed the violence and contagion of the other.
4. With the religious right, fundamental ontology replaces the episteme. What is contested is not knowledge, its site/citation - but ontology (not ontological issues) based on the fundamentalist belief in deity. There is only one Book, Foucault's divine nature (divination) writ large in its pages.
5. Bush appeared, alive and life-like at the World Trade Center ruins almost immediately after, conjoining his image with the intensity of destruction. One can relate this to the dynamics of post-traumatic-stress syndrome; the two images are indissolubly linked.
6. The left continuously focused on the negative aspects of the Republican party, over-determining, at least in print, the violence of a world-view at odds with the rest of the planet. The left - by which I mean liberals and anyone in an oppositional relationship to the Republican Party - remained unable to disseminate anything that would register in relation to basic moral issues; instead it reacted to the implicit violence of the right which insists on transcendent legislation within monotheistic demands.
7. Absolute morality is not concerned whatsoever with opinion. It is a fundamental structuring.
8. The right has been organizing, in the US, for at least a century and a half; this election and the last have been in preparation for decades. With the elimination of the 'fairness doctrine' under Reagan, and with monopoly ownership of local broadcasting, the right has been able to dominate the heartland without opposition. The corporate and Christian merge, to the benefit of both. Think of it as a form of salesmanship: God withholds and deploys.
9. In the 60s, which for many of us appears to be a history of the left, the right quietly embraced both technology and structural compromises that increased and solidified its power base, in rural and impoverished areas of the country. Televangelism was one of the first institutionalized ideological distribution systems. It remains coherent, organized, and funded. Its base criss-crosses the United States, from rural to urban; it plays in the disenfranchised.
10. A fundamental flaw is the assumption that so-called minority votes are liberal and leftist; in fact, the opposite is increasingly the case. The left operates, by and large, within a traditional view of labor and social services; ideology, sexuality, and religion are kept out of the equation.
11. The 'American dream' is both part of class distinctions, and a force in their elimination. Don't underrate its influence; no matter how hard we try, there is no revolutionary class, but only power, desire, economic status, and diffused and focused oppression. There is no class to the extent that there are few class cultures; regional cultures cut across all sorts of boundaries. Class identity is extremely fluid; it is no longer (if it ever was) a lever for revolutionary action.
12. Corporate America is far more diverse and problematic than the left assumes; it also presents a very real world of almost infinite choice and identifications. Its collusions and corruptions are our collusions and corruptions, and have absolutely nothing to do with God and God's State. But in its withholding, its presentation of infinite longing, it allies itself with religious fundamentalism.
13. Cultural capital in the US is far more important than economic capital, and its boundaries cut across the latter in terms of class. We are all white trash and we are all intellectuals and theorists. We are all soccer moms, NASCAR dads, South Park Republicans, gold-standard hoarders, participants in Amerikan cultural implosion. But this capital can be rigidified, ordered, regulated; it is in collusion with the regulation of the state and the regulation of the body. Hackers are not necessarily harbingers of choice; it is too often their choice against others. The country tends towards closure.
14. Far too many judgments are made 'for' rural and so-called back- water areas, which are almost never heard themselves. The information discourse networks and religious institutions of the majority of American voters are concretely effaced by abstraction. The water of baptism is not H2O. The left tends to ignore the internal coherency, cohesion, of the right - which is heard only in mockery, satire, stereotype. There is no dialectic at work in Amerika, and no indication that dialog would produce anything but knee-jerk sloganeering.
15. Morality and fear are interwoven; it is the abject stereotyped image of gays fucking that appears to corrode the 'clean and pure' body politic. Your marriage wrecks my marriage. It is a failure of the left not to deal with this; dismissing the violent imaginary out of hand ensures its force within the political arena. In other words, what you do hurts me; we are all Christian, all one nation under God. under God: literally in the missionary position, fucked by God. God is the only legal, pure, fuck; it makes all other fucks dangerous, perverse, intense and incandescent.
16. In conservative America, the negation of negation is not dialectical, but also a return to a rapturous positivity. The elimination of the Other is at the core of the Rapture. The Rapture does not disseminate; it filters. The negation of negation thuds.
17. If one's religion insists that abortion, for example, is murder, then any means, including murder as literal self-preservation, may be used in return as a defensive and pre-emptive action. It is not ever a question of one side listening to another; it is a question of war to an infinite degree. This waged by Good against Evil; it is the war pre-ordained in the Book of Books, the testaments, sutras, Koran, classics. It is the war which founds the configured and classical horizon of Aristotelian logic: negation is not fuzzy, and the boundaries are drawn. Once drawn, anything, any means of victory, is not only possible, but honorable, righteous.
18. The church in rural and disenfranchised America is a communal and cohesive force, one of the few institutions capable of lived-community and defense against the rest of the world. But more than this, the church is also the locus for community activity and identity. To dismiss it, even in its intolerant and sometimes evangelical varieties, is to miss the point of its existence. For the individual, the church is salvation, explaining and preserving morality, even forgiving and abetting the temptations of sin.
19. The church overdetermines the rest of the world; rural and other- wise isolated communities have a surprisingly low degree of information flux. The church provides stability in a late-late-capitalist world of postmodernity, where selves, ideologies, and languages are contested. Within testament and testimony, there is no contestation; the church, in other words, 'puts a hedge around the Torah' (Pirke Avot).
20. In my opinion, the image of Kerry hunting (and killing) was not only hypocritical and distasteful, but also a premature sign of defeat. However, this had no affect on the election per se, which was already determined, way back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Billy Graham created the first automated post-office in the US - a religious embrace of technology that forecast the future of the country. Perhaps the left 'created' - i.e. the hacking manifesto - but the religious right utilized, entrenched, constructed a primary embrace of individual and instrumental reason that guaranteed the supple application of power when and where needed. The only real question here is why it took so long.
21. The left has been hampered by split ideologies and critique; the right, which permits no critique, has worked constantly with umbrella ideologies. On the right: division beneath the sign of the absolute. On the left: absolute division.
22. What has been exposed and contested in the US is often business as usual in the rest of the world. We are witnessing a movement from republic to empire, from the primacy of voting, to the primacy of dominant interests. Lewinsky's stained dress? Entertainment serving political impotency. O. J.? Politics as usual. Every case is the case of the century. Empire and circuses. Dominant interests? Absolute ceiling of transcendent God and capital, Capital.
23. On a personal level - I have lived in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Bushlands of Texas and Florida. What happened was no surprise. I voted early yesterday, and felt a sense of relief at the minor punctum I experienced. But I had no doubt that Bush would win, that my voice was primarily personal therapeutic. Instead of despair late last night/this morning, I've felt that our work, that of an opposition, has only just begun - that it could only just begin. We have to recognize, above all, that the US has done the will of the majority; the more we overlook this, excuse this, theorize this, wonder 'what went wrong,' the more we are weakened. Perhaps this is a positive sign - in the sense that the enemy, if it is an enemy, is clear, and no longer can be dismissed as an aberration.
24. The 'cultural war' is war. On our side: liberation, choice. On their side: lack of choice, governance. On our side: Infinite taxation and redistribution. On heir side: Zero taxation and centralization. On our side? The devils that plague. On their side: service to God.
25. Terror is an instrument of war. Terror is an instrument of piece. Terror is equivalent to sublimation. Terror is the wound that never heals. Terror is Mini's scar in Dracula. Terror throws the abject up in our faces. Terror constitutes closure against terror, against the abject. Terror is the speech of God.
26. Religion sublimates terror. To believe in God is to believe in terror. All difference becomes detour. Culture is detour, returning to the same place. The place is the place of God. Culture is the hedge of God.
27. I live, you die. Vote or die holds no truck with the faithful. The faithful live, do not die, die in order to live. Don't be deceived: The faithful fuck each other, divorce at a furious rate, commit crimes of the body, acts against and through the body, drugs and drinks coursing the body, the course of the body. The overcoming of the curse and course of the body is transcendence, the ultimate purity. I'm sorry, one good fuck and we go to Heaven.
28. Language is not action. Belief is action. Belief is not language. Theory talks itself to death. Academic theory rarely acts from the classroom - always safe PC stuff, even now. To believe is to act. To believe is not to speak, not to declare, attest, glossolalia. Or these are acts of belief, not necessarily speech acts. Believe, just believe.
29. The explication of fact in Michael Moore is replaced by the internalization of sin and the body in Mel Gibson. Old Testament, New Testament. One cannot argue with the wound. It's like watching a drama, someone getting kicked in the balls. As a viewer: You feel it. They're your balls. Try and talk now!
30. What the right knows: There is always already closure. Try and talk now!
Footnotes:
There are no footnotes to a scream.
Bibliography:
The New Testament, King James Version
Alan Sondheim's books include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity, Disorders of the Real, .echo, Vel and The Wayward as well as numerous other chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. His videos and films have been shown at venues ranging from Millennium (NY) to the Rotterdam Film Festival. Since 1/94, he has been working on an "Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality. He currently works in video, cdrom, performance, sound, and text, often in collaboration with his partner Azure Carter, dancer/choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite, and others. His recent work is at http://www.asondheim.org. He lives in Brooklyn.