As the principle of pure self-assertion comes to govern the public world of men, human agency is enslaved by the objects it produces, deprived of the personal authorship and recognizing response that are essential to subjectivity.

-Jessica Benjamin

Then came Madison Ave with the demand-production industry.

I was one of the minority at one point a couple of years back who said that the probability of the Bush administration or Israel-during-Bush attacking Iran was near zero. I got a lot of breathless reactions from terrified liberals on that… this Bush person is crazy, he’ll do anything, etc etc etc.

Now let me take my turn at Iran-attack alarmism; because I believe Obama’s foreign policy is leading more directly to an attack on Iran than Bush’s ever did. From Israel wanting to create a new “facts on the ground,” or from Obama-Clinton’s increasing anti-Iran bellicosity as part of their so-called smart-power shenanigans.

If the US-Israeli condominuim is politically unbreakable, the newly arising impasses may only be resolvable with a common enemy.

Bush was not the problem. It’s way bigger than Bush.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/final-destination-iran-1.1013151

http://thebulletin.us/articles/2010/03/12/news/world/doc4b9a66da99d72326077419.txt

http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100301_6099.php

Here’s Jim Lobe from AT Online.

We find exactly the same disposition of mind in the person accustomed to thinking by images and intuition. Since he yields to evidence and needs this evidence, he resists demonstrations. Reasoning irritates and exasperates him without convincing him: what good are such roundabout methods? Why such a slow pace? Why stop at every step to secure one’s position, when he can have the result in one move? Intuition can enable him to grasp the totality in a flash. The most precise demonstration possible will not convince such a person, because he is desensitized to reason. The sequence of the parts of a reasoned argument does not strike him as at all necessary.

Impatience and the skip-over. Once a society is entrained to this, it becomes the unwitting servant of advertizing and propaganda. This is nearly impermeable to critical persuasion, because there is already a reflex in place - Impatience and the Skip-Over - that filters out critical discourse. When I say reflex, I’m not being figurative. It is involuntary, and at some level even organic.

What teacher who is explaining a complex topic hasn’t encountered this wall in students? How much worse is it now that officialdom has embraced the dogwaggery of the standardized test?

At West Point, the harried cadets had a saying: Fuck the concept, give me the answer.

Ellul continues:

I recall a group of young people who were fervent in their political concerns and whose education had been based on images. They listened to a magnificent lecture on Algeria in 1959 — a lecture astonishing in its documentation, intellectual rigor, fine analysis, and solid synthesis. The practical conclusions of this presentation flowed in a precise manner from its premises. Afterward these young people said to me: “That’s very good. No doubt he’s right. But we ‘feel’ differently.” They knew nothing of Algeria, of course, except for images. This anecdote seems typical to me of the misunderstanding between word-oriented and image-oriented people.

The word really cannot reach those who are oriented toward images. To such people it seems utterly empty, like vain talk. A person cannot take seriously what proceeds from the word when he is accustomed to the palpable, concrete, and living aspects of images, The word seems like wind, or like something without life.

Excerpt from Chapter 6:

“The hatred of the word has won over even the humblest people”; but at the same time the common person has experienced a mutation that gives him access to the world of images. This mutation took place not because people reflected and chose it (consciously preferring sight and this imaged universe) but as a result of the change in environment and circumstances. No deliberation or conscious choice was made. Artificial images became profuse, and thus the environment we live in changed. We have involuntarily chosen these artificial images.

We prefer looking at our pictures to looking at the landscape, and when we do happen to look at a landscape, we look at it as if it were a photograph: “Pretty as a picture!” We are better at grasping the beauty of a work of art in reproduction than in the original. We have changed without noticing that anything was happening to us! As usual, when the technical world changes, it seems to all of us that these are just neutral tools that are placed at our disposal, while we remain sovereign and unchanged. I am still myself. The things that are multiplying are at my service, but I remain intact. This is the naive claim of the ordinary person (I use this expression, “the ordinary person,,’ a good deal. It comes from the Italian: uomo qualunque, on which I wrote a rather careful study to show that it could be a scientific sociological category, and an indispensable one at that: “La Notion d’homme quelconque en tant qu’hypothèse de travail sociologique,” Revista de Sciencias Sociales, 1964.) who does not even ask himself this question; the scholar considers the question and remains sure of his ground. Yet, generally, we are completely changed by our means, and in particular by our image-laden environment.

This change was all the more complete because we were in complete accord with it. That hatred of language proclaimed by intellectuals coincided perfectly with the inadequacy of everyone’s language. And the rash of images harmonized quite well with all modern human tendencies, since we were already influenced and changed by the general working of techniques. We had already become different, and in order to be comfortable with our new selves we needed images, both for distraction and because of their usefulness. Thus there existed on the one hand the technical possibility of an indefinite production of images, and on the other the ordinary person’s desire to receive them.

I have an unquenchable thirst for more and more of the images that are so dear to me. Why should this be? First, because of my laziness and the ease afforded by images. Everything becomes so simple when transformed into images. When a Beirut building caves in, I see it. I am more involved than if I had read an account of the fighting. The rapid flow of images gives me a direct grasp of the event, and of many others like it. I do not have time to linger over them. I want to see so many things…. And furthermore, I have to keep learning more and more. Not only is there in an objective sense a lot to learn, but I must learn it. For this reason images are essential.

Thanks to images I will learn directly the new techniques of my trade and the information I need to know. I have total and direct contact with things that would be terribly complicated if I had to go the slow route of discursive analysis, then synthesis, progressing from stage to stage by intellectual assimilation.

But there is something even deeper: we live increasingly separated from the natural environment (we frantically try to rediscover it when we go on vacation). When we lose contact with this reality, which used to be the essential reality of our lives, we develop an extremely deep need for another reality. Modern people are the only living beings in a nonliving environment. Because they live in a new abstract, theoretical milieu, unrelated to their tradition, they cannot yet conceive of this technical milieu as reality.

The simplest way he puts it in his essay is that the word is encroached upon in ways that superficialize or eliminate the person-to-person. No matter whether you are explaining to me how to fix a broken toilet, how class and gender intersect in workplaces, or how I feel when I risk loving you.

Technical society crowds out the intersubjective the way taylorism crowds out all meaning in the apotheosis of efficiency… part of the same process. The word is subversive of this process, because it always carries this creative potential inside the shared medium of language.

That’s why despots burned newspapers and hung public speakers. Now they crowd them out with a flood of information and images that are one-way, unanswerable.

Don’t know that Ellul has any particular plan in mind. It’s just a critique. I respect that as one who has taken a break from the windmills, and adopted the temporary standard: “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

Well… the other one is, “We must work in the garden.”

with authority-figures such as those who needs enemies ?

” U.S. Military Covering Up Possible Murders Of Female Service
Members. ”

link soon. Thanks. Timothy R. Anderson

As the deceit behind the Lehman Brothers collapse is exposed, a new book unveils the cult-like power that its executives held over their wives.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7061698.ece