Whose History?

"At bottom . . . we are faced with an alternative: either we suppose a real that is entirely permeable to history (to meaning, to the idea, to interpretation, to decision) and we ideologize or, by contrast, we suppose a real that is ultimately impenetrable and irreducible and in that case we poetize."

-Jean Baudrillard, from the intelligence of evil of the lucidity pact

I wasn't sure where to put this post, originally - it could have gone to the Surrational Rhetoric page and been about the fictionalization of an already fictional real recognized as such (the latter part of the quote from Baudrillard), or it could be here. So here it is, and as a result it will have more to do with ideology.

Things happen. Whether or not they are worth remembering is another matter altogether - an importance we imbue on them, conciously or otherwise. For instance: the life of a tree. Not really worth remembering, apart from the oxygen it provides for us to breath. But why not? It is part of the human condition in contemporary times that we imagine ourselves as apart - individual, atomized - as individuals, as cultures, as a species. Parallel to the idea of individuality, then, another one becomes pressing: that of identity. Without the notion of identity, there would be no way to speak about individuals since identity allows for a difference to be posited.

So we have histories. We have individual life histories, the histories of countries, the histories of cultures and subcultures, the history of the planet, of the solar system, of the galaxy, of the universe itself. Why do we have all this? Simply put: to figure out who the fuck we are. Then there are those who would like to tell us just that, and this is ideology. The mass media has for a long time had a large hand in manipulating minds, creating ideology by controlling history - or the portrayal of it - as it happens. With the explosion of internet usage this manipulation has slowed, or declined, or something - but I won't make any judgments on the actual value or what-have-you of the internet, since I'm still making up my mind.

-the ambassador

Masks and Markets

Michel Foucault, again in The Birth of Biopolitics, says that "the art of government . . . which has now become the program of most governments in capitalist countries . . . involves, on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises." This, I think, helps to clarify some of what I wrote in my previous post on human capital. It is not that the education system promotes uniformity and conformity in the development of human capital - instead, the genius of it springs from the "multiplicity and differentiation" that Foucault mentions.

The logical course that this differentiation follows would, I believe, flow down to the level of the individual. Enterprises may very well be - and are spoken of most highly when they are - individual enterprises.

Although this was probably not in the minds of those who developed the neo-liberal governmentality, the idea of differentiation at the level of the individual matches up quite well with an idea we can see in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. This idea is that of the "decentered subject." In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek writes that "'Decentrement' thus first designates . . . the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my 'real' self or in my external mask . . ." This ambiguity, then, allows for the very differentiation within the individual that meshes so well with the neo-liberal project. It is precisely because we can slide between identifications - because, as Zizek writes, "the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible . . ." - that we are able to project the identification which makes us most "valuable" in the moment.

This shifting from one identity to another can be seen fairly clearly online. Subjects have multiple email accounts, multiple accounts on social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Friendster), and, subsequently, slightly different identities for each. What we see, then, is a diffraction of subjectivity at an individual level. Since it is impossible - or nearly, at any rate - to pinpoint exactly who our "real" selves are, it becomes easier (and the virtual world online facilitates this) to assume different masks in different situations.

To bring it back to Foucault, he posits that neo-liberal govermentality attempts - through constant intervention on the "conditions" of society - to bring every facet of life under the regulation of the market. My "added value" to his idea is this: we assume different identities, different masks, in different markets. With the proliferation of these markets into more facets of life, we must create and take on more masks - and it is the void of our subjectivity that allows this governmentality to proceed as it does.

-the ambassador