Tempo Task Redux
Was 2009 really three years ago? Were we talking about Blackwater, torture, and the Reichian warrior-father back then? I suppose we were.
And about how tempo tasks are the ritual used to manifest the warrior-father. Reviewing then with Ann Kibbey, 2003:
Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric… from Bush’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell’s insistence that “time is running out” as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the “Showdown” or “Standoff” with Iraq. The evocation of the Western and all its prejudices now infuses U.S. culture and underwrites U.S. militarism. It seems that Bush, initially distinctive for his inarticulateness and stupidity, has succeeded in forcing (and enforcing) that same inarticulateness and stupidity on the U.S. public.
People were stunned when Bush patronizingly dismissed the massive anti-war demonstrations in his “Father Knows Best” speech on the following Monday, but that’s consistent with the gender ideology of the Western. As we ought to be aware, the ideology of gender and the ideology of genocidal violence are intertwined in the Western. The parallel action that typifies the conclusion of the Western (and other U.S. ‘action movies’) has generally been characterized only by its racist polarization of populations, which creates an artificial binary opposition that is resolved through the physical annihilation of one side by the other. But there is another dimension to it: The polarization of gender roles that is intertwined with it. What Americans seem slow to realize is the repugnant role in which they have now been cast, that of the female victim who must be rescued and saved by the male hero, a female victim whose role is to be helpless, mute, and passive, immobilized by fear as she awaits the outcome of the chase. Such rescues are in no way about social justice. They are artificial “tempo tasks” (Sergei Eisenstein’s wonderful phrase). The tempo task actively closes off ethical and political issues. That is its purpose. With the inception of the tempo task – “time is running out” –, morality is located in the sidelined female victim, whose role is not to act morally, but to merely personify and symbolize morality. She passively awaits the outcome of the genocidal violence whose purported aim is to rescue her. This is why we are now being told to hunker down in the cabin, wrap ourselves in plastic sheeting, put duct tape over our mouths, and await the outcome of the horrific violence that is being perpetrated ostensibly to ‘save us.’
No wonder, then, that Bush had no difficulty relegating the anti-war demonstrations to the role of moral symbolism, the cries of the helpless victim in need of rescue. He used it as yet another occasion to display his own ‘masculine heroism’ with which he intends to save us from danger, first from ‘evil’ Iraq, and then from ourselves through the pending Domestic Security Act. Many people also seem to think this upcoming war, repulsive though it is, will be short. After all, tempo tasks end the film and impose their version of order very quickly – it’s the last part of the movie. No plans for reconstruction? Hey, that’s not in the movie script.
A reflexive reliance on the genre conventions of the Western has not only led to silence. It has helped to obscure the reality that this war has already been going on for many years, that the bombing of Iraq was never stopped and has already intensified again, that genocide has already been perpetrated by economic sanctions, that the much-touted weapons of mass destruction are those of the U.S., whose depleted uranium weaponry has already mutilated or killed much of the population of southern Iraq.
The genre conventions of the Western have mandated a deafening and ignorant silence in the U.S. in the last year. An important dimension of this silence is the de facto moratorium on gender issues. Ideologies of gender become highly coercive when they are taken for granted, when debates about gender are suppressed as unimportant, when they are dismissively cast aside as irrelevant. To be silent now about gender is to take the bait, to perceive the current political and economic crisis through the lens of socially conservative gender roles.
So this is what we mean by “tempo tasks.” Now to the corresponding subject for today: elections, and what we like to call “penile politics.” Both sides in this election are suggesting that failure to elect (Obama, Romney) will have catastrophic consequences. In terms of sheer stridency, the Republicans have won out by a length with the birther “controversy,” Obama’s alleged fealty to Islam, and the rest of the racially encoded (black muslims in your basement) appeals to white negrophobia. Atavism sells in the United States of America. But the Democrats have comported themselves as worthy opponents, with claims that democracy-as-our-way-of-life is in immanent danger from a Romney presidency. Romney would destroy the economy, lead us into World War III, sell us out to corporations (in these, I haven’t discerned the difference between the two candidates, actually). My facebook page was so cluttered with these dire warnings of Republican apocalypse that I suspended the account today. It is affecting my mental health, I think.
Has this just become a cultural default? Historian Brad Gregory writes:
The de facto guideline for the living of human life in the Western world today seems simply to be “whatever makes you happy” – “so long as you’re not hurting anyone else” – in which the criteria for happiness, too, are self-determined, self-reported, and therefore immune to critique, and in which the meaning of “hurting anyone else” is assumed to be self-evident, unproblematic, or both. Because there is no shared framework within which such disagreements might rationally be debated and perhaps overcome, and yet life goes on, moral disagreements are translated into political contestation within an emotivist culture – one that is closely related to if not largely identical with the individualistic “therapeutic culture”… Protests, the exertion of power, and manipulation, whether overt or disguised, displace rational discourse, as has become ever more apparent, for example, in American public life and the media in recent decades. Everything becomes “political” because once morality has been subjectivized no arguments can succeed, since there is no shared set of assumptions from which they can proceed. Hence the applicability of Foucauldian notions of power to analyses of contemporary Western society. (The Unintended Reformation, Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 182)
Within that sweeping description by Gregory, there seems to be a game dynamic. That game dynamic is strategic and zero-sum. Escalation of antagonism is built into the process, which comes to be a form of low-intensity war. The reasons for going to war are then subsumed into the tactical considerations. Opportunity overcomes principle. This tension where opportunity and principle come into conflict is exactly where the tempo task can be most effective in “overcoming” the contradiction with the rationalization that “we don’t have time for niceties.” This is a male trope, and one where men traditionally re-seize prerogatives from women and weaker men, valorizing contingent male power (and violence where necessary!) as redemption embodied in a warrior-father or his symbolic equivalent.
At a time when we ought to be questioning the assertions of so-called leaders and taking their every fallacy to task – no matter which side they are on – we find instead this frantic and increasingly dishonest sloganeering… for the greater good, of course.
Stan:
Just saw a good panel discussion about the hollowing out of public moral discourse. Weird, huh?
12 October 2012, 1:08 pmHenry:
Thank You From the Bottom of My Empty American Heart
Dear Ruling Elite
by ADAM ENGEL
Dear Ruling Elite, Enablers and Trustees,
I am Nobody. If that. Perhaps Nobody in particular—just another not very “productive” member of the other 99-percent. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your astonishing feat of transforming this once racist, imperialist Repoblip or Demogocracy or whatever it was into the Greatest Liberator of Human Souls the world has ever known.
The rest:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/12/dear-ruling-elite/
12 October 2012, 2:32 pmKevin Hornbuckle:
I went to tag you in FB for a discussion on feminism, patriarchy, and something bell hooks wrote. I will refer the people on that thread to this website, which I presume you won’t mind. I was surprised that you dropped off FB. I see your reason above. Fortunately my FB is not so contaminated with dire warnings of Republican apocalypse. I’m apparently left wing enough to scare off most Democrats.
You have some very interesting arguments and ideas in this blog. I had not seen the Brad Gregory quote before. Its very insightful, as are your additions to it (not all of which I agree with).
Anyway, if your mental health can stand it, I hope you make it back to farcebook sometime.
13 October 2012, 6:58 amMichael Anderson:
Good to keep repeating the lesson, Stan….thanks.
As a “tempo” task: In music, when you are learning a passage, you repeat it until it becomes automatic, then you forget it and just play.
Went to a wonderful concert last night—-there is life outside the matrix. THINK THINK THINK!, said the artist in his instruction book. Things you learn in one song can help to learn another Transfer of Learning. Pattern recognition. Connect those dots.
And don’t practice while watching television….
13 October 2012, 8:33 amDeAnander:
The immediate thing that sprang to my mind was the various proposed geo-engineering boondoggles. Now there’s a Tempo Task justification if ever I heard one
If we don’t obediently and immediately give the Nivenesque technocrats all the money they want, to do crazy hubristic untested things with global consequences, we’ll all DIEEEEE! — probably tomorrow. No time to review, no time to evaluate alternatives, we have to rush off to launch space shields or seed the ocean with ferric oxide or whatever wonderful snake oil is most recently on sale…
Sigh. Panic is always a great mystifier.
14 October 2012, 12:57 amMichael Anderson:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12102-why-are-americans-so-easy-to-manipulate
“What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society. Researcher Mark Lepper was able to diminish young children’s intrinsic joy of drawing with Magic Markers by awarding them personalized certificates for coloring with a Magic Marker. Even a single, one-time reward for doing something enjoyable can kill interest in it for weeks.
Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is necessary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous [children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less likely than other children to care and share at home.”
14 October 2012, 3:41 pmStan:
The corollary is technocratic liberal society – where there is no longer good and evil (civil government abdicated any responsibility for these), only obedience. Like kids that have to get their reward for what ought to be done, we have learned through deeply habituating practice – by obeying and obeying absent any moral consideration of what we are doing – that obedience is the highest virtue.
14 October 2012, 4:02 pm(Boer) Tom:
That second last paragraph (Within that sweeping…) – could you please expand on each sentence with descriptions and examples? I can think of several examples, but spelling it out in the comments makes it clearer – otherwise, it comes off to the neophyte much like the output of the postmodernism generator – a sentence that looks interesting if a bit obscure and vague is left unexplained, and a similarly vague sentence follows.
As an example: A typical game dynamic example is ‘street bullying’ by radio and television broadcasters (e.g. ‘conservative’ talk radio) justifying violence by state officials against union members, minorities, etc., and other broadcasters pushing back verbally to win the support of the targets (union members, minorities, etc), for the purpose of corralling the support of various parties, who often share the policies of the conservative broadcasters’ patrons.
This situation of attacks leads to various alliances of convenience (thus the game – small players try to improve their situations by joining alliances), with victories by one alliance being defeats to another (cooperation is only within another, unannounced, alliance, against another group, whether as an alliance or not); examples include the attack on public sector trade unions, attacks by one religious group against another (or by non-religious groups against certain religious groups).
The attacks are strategic, in that one alliance tries to destroy the institutions of another alliance, e.g. trade unions, think tanks, organizations (e.g. ACORN), public spaces (or their availability for meeting), etc., such that the group ceases to function, or can only function with great difficulty. Groups that are successfully attacked may try to regroup, and attack institutions that they see as belonging to the attackers’ alliance. As the institutions are destroyed, a mass-like situation is formed, as people lack environments that foster their relative independence and space for discussion.
16 October 2012, 2:39 pmStan:
Hit and run. Tonight, MSNBC is hyping the presidential “debate” scheduled later this evening as “the heavyweight championship fight.” Penile politics meets The Spectacle… it’s all about the game. The ends justify the means, then the means become the new ends.
16 October 2012, 5:22 pmBrian Willson:
I am happy to be re-connecting with you, Stan, and I will enjoy your comments and essays. I loved your piece on “Why I Won’t Vote.”
I live in Portland, Oregon with Becky (she is currently in Viet nam at the Viet Nam Friendship Village near Hanoi that deals with the 3rd generation of Agent Orange birth defects). I like portland – there are lots of good folks here – and it is a great cycling city which is great for my handcycling. But I am wondering how I am going to survive emotionally, psychically, socially, and financially in this horrible USAmerican culture, since it seems to me that only by living in a vibrant interactive local food community without the need for driving cars to see and interact with one another, is indispensable for dignity. I don’t fly, but Portland has Amtrak which I take a lot. Also a good VA Hospital here.
How are you doing these days?
Brian
31 October 2012, 6:54 pmStan:
Doing fair to middlin’, Brian. Glad to hear from you, and that you all are settled in at OR. Hope this finds you and Becky well. The bricolage continues! (-:
1 November 2012, 5:55 amMichael Anderson:
Didn’t know quite where to post this, but it resonates with systems and power (some of these people leap out of bed and say “life is to be LIVED!”), and the overriding control that the system, or bending the stick a ways, the machine, exerts on people. This had a sort of catchy title, but these people are totally structured to the system (and I know there are many more). Even their recreation is machine-like.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/apr/01/what-time-ceos-start-day
3 April 2013, 12:06 pmMichael Anderson:
Isn’t the concept of bricolage in use in the military also? To what end?
The Wiki on Bricolage had a lot to say about music—-I wonder about this. From music to working for the M.I.C.C.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Baxter
5 April 2013, 11:52 amStan:
The more I reflect on bricolage, the more I think it is an anthropological category.
6 April 2013, 8:08 am