Jameson and Bush lies

[pynchonoid]

Published on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 by
CommonDreams.org 

Outrage At Administration Lying Misses A Crucial Point


by Ira Chernus

 
Wow. The government knew all along there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And they used
that as an excuse to take us to war anyway. My
generation, raised on the film Casablanca, would say
“I’m shocked!—shocked!—George W., to discover lying
going on in your administration.” A younger generation
would say, “Well, duh!!!” I mean, what did anyone
expect? A government that would tell us only the
truth? 

The truth, revealed so unexpectedly in the mainstream
press, also reveals a profound dilemma for the left.
We run around excitedly exclaiming, “We told you so!”
Then we expect to see the Bush war machine at least
crippled, if not brought down entirely. When the
Bushies seem to sail along virtually unscathed, we
don’t get it. We are outraged that they lied, and
doubly outraged that so few Americans seem to care. 

In our perplexed outrage, we are missing a crucial
point. While we quite rightly try to digest mountains
of facts that contain the truth, we also need to
consider the peculiar fate of facts in this postmodern
world. While we quite rightly drink in the words of a
Noam Chomsky or a Howard Zinn (and we should be
immensely thankful for them), we would do well to give
equal time to a Fredric Jameson. 

Jameson taught us, better than anyone else, that the
American empire rests on three legs: global corporate
capitalism, digital technology, and the triumph of
image over factual reality. He taught us why the
empire needs each of these legs to stay stable, and
how each reinforces the others in a totalitarian web
of seemingly benign postmodern imperium. Most of us
already understand the power of, and links between,
digitized high-tech and globalization. 

The crucial piece many have missed is the third leg.
In postmodern capitalism, commodities are reduced to
digital images, and images are sold as commodities.
The images take on a life of their own. They become
the reality. Reality becomes an endless commercial.
Advertising is no longer just a means to an end; it is
the essential activity of our whole society. 

That is a simple truth we all know, because most of us
live it every day. I surely do. I think The Matrix and
the new Honda ad and my new screensaver are pretty
cool, too. 

Intellectuals like Jameson help us take the next step,
to understand what happens when images replace
reality. Our society stops asking the questions that
used to point the way to truth: “Does the image
accurately represent the reality it claims to
represent? Does it represent any reality at all?” When
those questions are no longer asked, the issue of
truth becomes irrelevant. 

Then it is easy enough to declare the elected leader
of a whole nation, or even the entire United Nations,
“irrelevant,” because the words are just images
anyway. All questions of truth and reality simply
vanish in the airwaves filled with the digitized
pictures and sounds that are now the be-all and
end-all of our collective life. 

So the Bush administration's warnings of Iraqi WMD
were merely images, an ad campaign clever enough to
sell us a war we did not need. But no one ever bought
the reality, because there was no reality to buy. The
public bought the commercials. In a postmodern
society, that is all we ever buy, because images are
all that is for sale. 

Then, when the truth hits the front pages of the New
York Times and Washington Post, it’s only another
bunch of new images. For most Americans, there can be
no jarring clash between image and reality, because
they long ago stopped asking about the relation
between image and reality. It’s not merely that they
expect the government to falsify reality. They expect
the government, like every other segment of our
society, to ignore reality completely. 

If it is all advertising anyway, then why get upset?
Yesterday there were WMD in Iraq. Today there were
never any. Tomorrow, there might have been tons of
them. It’s a kaleidoscope of ever-changing imagery,
like what we see surfing websites or flipping channels
on the remote. You’d have to be way uncool to ask what
truth lies beneath all these images. It’s so much
easier to let the government and the multinational
corporate system roll on undisturbed. And so much more
fun. When Fredric Jameson and other progressive
scholars of postmodernism analyze the postmodern
system, they want us to understand that this system
does not force itself upon us. Every day, we make
choices that shape our future. There is no end of
history. They bring us these ideas because they think
we can make better choices if we understand what is
going on. If we want to cure the ills of our society,
we must first diagnose those ills accurately. 

Our outrage at the Bush administration's lies is an
attack upon a symptom. Symptomatic relief is always
welcome. But it doesn’t make sense to deal with
symptoms and ignore the underlying disease. If you
want to cure the disease, you first have to understand
it. A place to start is through Jameson’s brilliant
analysis. (You can read more about it at
<http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NewspaperColumns/LongerEssays/JamesonPostmodernism.htm>
). 

We must go on unmasking lies and presenting factual
truth. It will make some difference. But it won’t make
enough difference unless, at the same time, we try to
rescue the very idea of truth itself, before it
disappears forever into that kaleidoscope of digitized
images. 

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. He can be contacted
at Chernus at colorado.edu. 


<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-02.htm>



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com