THE HAMMER

[Alan Sondheim]

(This was expanded from the original version, for possible inclusion in a
book. As I expanded, it made less and less sense to me, precisely as the
tools of analysis made less and less sense. One cannot argue with a
hammer.

The hammer is myself, the left, the right, all those divisions and
monologies which are increasingly senseless as the world goes on its
destructive path. As with many of us, I write to keep myself sane. As with
many of us, inscription, with all the phenomenology it implies, is close
to failure. - Alan)



THE HAMMER


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 (divinatio) 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!

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Footnotes

There are no footnotes to a scream.

Bibliography

The New Testament, King James Version


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