Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Obama campaign.  The entire campaign promises one thing: CHANGE.  There is no qualifier, no explanation, no plan… just the promise that things will change.  The utter obscurity of what this word might mean reminded me of a quote from my favorite French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard.  Allow me to re-word the quote just slightly with this political message in mind:

‘CHANGE’: the message we hear, see, and experience at every Obama campaign is mysterious, because we really have no option to not change.  If you elect a new president, change is inevitable..  It is like saying ‘I am the candidate of inevitability’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should vote in order to realize destiny, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘change or no change’, ‘the future or the present’, it would become ‘the future is the future!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange the future for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this political message is perhaps: ‘if you are stupid enough to vote in change, you get obama!

Ya… I couldn’t think of any either.

In all seriousness, I did have a few thoughts to share on the issue. First, Alan Dershowitz (a harvard law professor of whom I have previously referenced on this blog) came out in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal and very nearly defended Spitzer.

Generally, wise and intelligent prosecutors use their discretion properly–to target organized crime, terrorism, financial predation, exploitation of children and the like. But the very existence of these selectively enforced statutes poses grave dangers of abuse. They lie around like loaded guns waiting to be used against the enemies of politically motivated investigators, prosecutors and politicians.

If this is what “wise and intelligent” prosecutors do… one can only think what Dershowitz thinks about the prosecutors in this case. He certainly has a valid point: overly-broad criminal statutes can be used for ill by partisan political figures. This isn’t to say that Spitzer shouldn’t have been held to the same standards as anyone else, or that he is above the law–but it is never right to selectively apply criminal statutes… these should be applied equally to all people.

One other person who came to mind as I reflected on this story was Jean Baudrillard, a french philosopher about whom I have written extensively about. In his book, America, he examines the media fascination and the cultural response Americans have to such events. I’ve re-read the book in its entirety and cannot find the exact quote I wanted… but here are a few relevant portions:

The fact is that a certain banality, a certain vulgarity which seem unacceptable to us in Europe seem more than acceptable — even fascinating — to us here. All our modern governments owe a kind of political meta-stability to the regulation of public opinion by advertising. Mistkes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crutial think is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction.

No one keeps count of the mistakes made by the world’s political leaders any more, mistakes which, in days gone by, would have brought about their downfall… The people no longer take pride in their leaders and the leaders no longer pride themselves on their decisions….

Everything has to be made public: what are you worth, what you earn, how you live – there is no place here for interplay of a subtler nature.

What I couldn’t find was Baudrillard’s amazement with the American media’s fascination with scandals (particularly of the sexual nature). He notices that while Americans insist on absolute transparency; the French handle scandals very differently… hiding events under layers of Bourgeois norms and phony appearances. One wonders which is the better alternative.

P.S. – turns out you can become a “fan” of Ashley Dupré on Facebook. Who knew?!

P.S.2 – check out her solo music debut on her myspace page. Not really my style… but… it’s a start.

What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imagry, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doind, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.  This is the special effect of our times.  The ecstasy of the polaroid is of the same order:  to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become reality.  It is a dream.  It is the optical materilization of a magical process.  The polariod photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.

‘LIVE OR DIE’: the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death.  If you live, you live, if you die, you die.  It is like saying ‘be yourself, or don’t be!’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘pay or die!’, ‘your money or your life!’, it would become ‘your life or your life!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange life for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: ‘ if you get more stupid than me, you die!’

I like how he doesn’t see a need for some ultimate conclusion on the meaning of the statement… nothing irks me more then philosophers who get caught up in the meaningless questions.  Even so, it seems he contemplates the statement long enough to expose it for what it is–and in doing so causes his reader to view the common and banal with a fresh perspective.  And you wondered why I like this guy so much… 

Here is part 2 of my installment on Jean Baudrillard’s book, “America“.  In this portion, Baudrillard really starts ‘drawing the boundaries’, if you will; clearly defining the fundamental elements of society – elements by which we distinguish ourselves from Europe and the rest of the world.   I find great importance in his explanation;  primarily because it reaffirms the fact that we are unique… it carries with it a certain form of identity–an identity we so easily miss without the perspective of a foreigner.  

The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochment as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift.  There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.  You are born modern, you do not become so.  And we have never become so…

Every country bears a sort of historical predestination, which almost definitively determines its characteristics.  For us, it is the bourgeois model of 1789 – and the interminable decadence of that model – that shapes our landscape.  There is nothing we can do about it:  everything here revolves around the nineteenth-century bourgeois dream.

As an initial matter, I find Baudrillard’s fatalistic point of view fascinating; the differences we have with Europe are not simply skin deep but amount to an insurmountable hurdle.   His phrase, ”a chasm of modernity”, is particularily important in this regard; it implies an inescapable difference in values — values that appear impossible to change.   When he writes, It is almost as if he wishes he could have been born modern; but realizes it would be an futile attempt to become so.  

Now, this begs the question:  what are these modern traits that differentiate us from our European counterparts?   Although Baudrillard discusses a number of different alternatives, I found his explanation of pragmatism to be the most interesting:

America is neither dream nor reality.  It is a hyperreality.  It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.  Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too.  It may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum – that of the immanence and material transcription of all values.  The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation.  They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language to describe it, since they themselves are the model.

We shall remain nostalgic utopians, agonizing over our ideals, but baulking, ultimately, at their realization, professing that everything is possible, but never that everything has been achieved.  yet that is what America asserts.  Our problem is that our old goals – revolution, progress, freedom – will have evaporated before they were achieved, before they became reality.  Hence our melancholy. 

This is perhaps the most generous portion of his book; one can omly imagine the nasty letters he must have recieved back home after daring publish such an idea.  After all, one would hardly expect a Frenchman to use the term “utopia” and “America” in the same sentence… but perhaps we do not give the French enough credit…

I expect Baudrillard is not entirely correct on this point; we may exert the appearance of a utopian society… but it may be so only by appearance.  We have beautiful neighborhoods, grand cities, open prairies, beautiful mountains… but this is not by any stretch a completely accurate picture.  Cities slip into slums, neighborhoods merge into industrial areas, and beautiful parks must have a nearby landfill.  And behind every white picket fence exist abuses, quarrels, depression,  all the problems inherent with all societies.  Is a society utopian in appearance alone truly a utopian society?   Does it matter?

The Pragmatism of the U.S. is also a very interesting concept; we do not attempt to invent a better mousetrap, we only insist that we build the best one.  We are not satisfied to merely imagine concepts but to realize those concepts in very practical forms.  

Our Constitution is, in many ways, a perfect example of this.  Never before in history (that I am aware) was a legitimate government created solely by the power of the people (i.e. “We the people…”).  Instead of worrying about the feasibility of such a government, the founding fathers simply assumed a priori that the people had power to establish their own government, and that the resulting sovereign would be legitimate by definition.  Instead of theorizing where rights come from, it was simply stated as fact that such rights exist… end of discussion (“We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal”).  It would be as if the founding fathers said, “unicorns hereby exist”… and a unicorn materialized before their very eyes.  Very perceptive to say the least.

Having laid the groundword, so to speak, Baudrillard then turns to the attitudes of Europe and offers an interesting reprimand of sorts:

 We criticize Americans for not being able to either analyze or conceptualize.  But this is a wrong-headed critique.  It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized.  Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite:  it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them…  Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other.  They build the real out of ideas…

It’s funny how knowledge affects your perception of information;  it wasn’t even a day after I had read this passage that I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the drive home and overheard him say, “I don’t search for the deeper meaning of reality… reality is enough for me”.  Like him or not, I think he represents the mindset of a very large portion of our society.  Upon reflection of his quote, it really hit me how grounded in reality we are as a society… how we look at everything in terms of it’s immediate consequences and practical ramifications.  We are not a country of day-dreamers… but a country of do-ers.  We all want to be involved with something… be that another person, an organization,  politics, career, a hobby–we all want the experience of reality; we want to participate in it as much as possible; whether or not this is a uniquely American characteristic or not is anyone’s guess; perhaps it is more a human trait then anything else.  

Well, I’m all blogged out…  more to come!  Any thoughts?

Being this is my first post in the `America` series, I must say I’m somewhat without a clear format to follow.  I must say, Baudrillard’s words speak for themselves… what little I may add is certainly secondary… so I suppose the best approach is to let Baudrillard speak first and then I’ll comment below.

At issue in this particular post is Baudrillard’s more general insight on America’s financial system… it’s capitalist system… its insistence on complete fluidity of capital, it’s dependence on credit, investment, and security.  I particularly like his “parishioner/priest” analogy.

It is true that ownership of money burns your fingers, like power.  We need people to take this risk for us and we should be eternally grateful to them.  This is why I hesitate to deposit money in a bank.  I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.  

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?  And the yet the atmosphere in a bank is that of the confessional (there is no more kafkaesque situation):  admit that you have money , confess that this is not normal.  And it is true:  having money is an awkward situation, from which the bank is only too happy to deliver you:  ’Your money interests us‘ == the bank holds you to ransom, its greed knows no bounds.  Its immodest gase reveals your private parts to you, and you are forced to hand your money over to appease it.  

One day I tried to close my account, taking all the money out in cash.  The teller would not let me go with such a sum on me:  it was obscene, dangerous, immoral.  Would I not at least take travelers’ cheques?  ’No, the whole lot in case’.  I was mad.  In America, you are stark raving mad if, instead of believing in money an its marvelous fluidity, you want to carry it round on you in banknotes.  Money is dirty;  that you must admit.

Its interesting that he parallels ownership of money with a sin we must be absolved of — rather successfully using the priest and confessional example.  What is more interesting is that this feeling is a universal one as near as I can tell.  I wouldn’t dare think of carrying over $100 cash on me at a given time–never mind the fact that I’ve never had my wallet stolen nor have any fears that it might soon be lost.  I have been conditioned to believe that the bank is the only reasonable place wherein my cash belongs – conditioned into believing that missing out on that 3% interest rate on a grand is the first mis-step in a life doomed to poverty.  After all, if I don’t put that next check right into the bank… I might (gasp!) SPEND it!  Save, Save, Save!  and by no means, don’t trust yourself with that responsibility!  The temptation will be too great to bear if you can feel those bills with your own two fingers; you MUST banish it from your presence… only by forgetting it exists can you be responsible with it.  (but such is the way I was raised).

In some ways it is truly a backwards culture we live in; only by forgetting and removing something from our top-of-mind awareness can we effectively ‘use’ it.

How much more bizarre is it then, that Americans live off credit cards… charging this and that… and frequently incurring debt greater then their cash savings (and paying 20%+ in interest).

What is even more interesting to me — and not directly addressed by Baudrillard — is the systematic devaluation of cash as a means of exchange.  As technology makes things more convenient, we are always turning to non-cash alternatives to procure goods and services (and pay them off for that matter).  If I had my way, I wouldn’t pay with cash at all;  the magical numbers residing on some bank server somewhere gratiously allowing me a modest balance seems more preferable to me –even in its abstractness — then a wadfull of cash ever would.

Is this some universal preference?  or am I just the one crazy person!

Although not a particularly recent book, “America” it is still a very insightful look into American culture and opinion as a general matter.  Baudrillard’s genius is the ability to ascertain causes–to determine why things exist in their current form.  Much of the book spends time exploring the reasons WHY the US is different then Europe –Culturally and Politically — often with a surprisingly positive conclusions.

Over the next month, I will be exploring a number of different topics addressed by Baudrillard–sparing you the time required to read the book in its entirety, but allowing you to think about the important issues he raises. 

If you are looking for stimulating reading without weeks of commitment, I highly suggest picking this book up at your local amazon.com retailer.