Lessons
The lesson of "Reagan": Wherever there is a drive for unity, there will be a driving tension between
presence and absence, immanence and transcendence, the utopian past of a golden age (in this
case, the fifties) and its contemporary return. That tension will be played out in a serial repetition of
off-balance images whose only solidity is provided by a structural homology between levels and
desires designed to erase their particularity (the cultural recycling so prevalent in the eighties). Make
way for the patriotic equation, to uplift the confused spirit of America. Red, white, and blue. The
body is the nation, The nation is a family. The family is a motherland. The spirit of the nation is in
mother's milk. It is in the air we breathe. The mother is the father. The father is sexless. He is virile.
He has a phallus, or doesn't, or we are it. The baby is a flag. The leg is a phallus. the president is an
anus. All true. But it doesn't really matter if it's true or false. Because the symbolic circling is not the
only thing going. Ideations are also circling. And the symbolic associations and ideational contents
meld into a mega-feedback loop that reaches an even higher power of infinity than either one alone,
blurring the very distincion between conscious and unconscious, real and fake, true and false. Yet in
the gidddy swirl of that vicious circle, there is always a region of clarity, at least locally, at least for a
moment, when a particular image or idea is actualized. And one always is, however transitorily.
Where one is, there is always at least a hint of body. Because the anus is also an anus, and a leg in addition to being a phallus is still a leg. No, we are not preamputated. Our cuts enable
reconnection. We are not regressed. Our holes are new and for the future.
The lesson of the Bush-thing: When the on-screen drive to unity comprehends its own inevitable
failure, accepting the defining human split (mind/body, self/other), it simultaneously succeeds in
integrating on another screen, in this case as a materialized command-function: techno-militarization,
the highest expression of which is the utter immanence of obliteration. Anybody out there?
CONTINUE
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