More Thoughts in Response to Levi Bryant

This time from his latest God and Mythico-Poetic Thought.

Rather than reject religion outright, how about rejecting the monotheism that requires inward directed souls/subjects to declare their belief in a perfect God? The internalized desire of the believer-subject is reproduced as well in Descartes who then can split himself from the external world of “Nature”, which is then in turn reproduced in the discourse of naturalist science. Both science and religion contain in their theories an ideal observer distinct from the external world; in one case an omnipresent God, in the other a complete world both external to the believer and total at once. Physics too has its religious pretensions in that elusive quest for the theory of everything.

The problem as I see it is rather in conceiving Nature as a whole and not working through its persistent aporias. We’re it not demanded to achieve a theory of Nature that matches or replaces a belief in Everything, scientists could be seen as producing accurate measurements without being hounded by deniers for being “just a theory”.

The mythico-poetic is of a different form than religions which force subjects to believe in a god. It is more like a background of cultural signifiers which make meaningful discourse possible just as much as the “wiredness” of our bodies. They contain many creation myths that do not explain in the same way as an individual explaining a foundational belief because they provide a foundational background for a common, shared cultural imagination.

The distinction I am drawing here is between subjective-belief in The universe and universes of symbolic reference as diverse as their are isolated cultures. This is possibly an ontological distinction, perhaps pertaining to the ground needed to have the the figure of a belief in general. I’m thinking now of the function of “the full body of the earth, the cosmic egg” in Deleuze and Guattari’s 3rd chapter of Anti-Oedipus. It plays the role of a territorial beginning from which flows and codings then implement primordial inscription. Still a rough draft of an interpretation of a massive work though.

Beware: Labyrinth Ahead

The world that we inhabit today is tangled up in such a convoluted manner that we can only give it its proper name by calling it a labyrinth. This world of ours is no longer a limitless world of indefinite expansion and sustained growth, nor does can it appeal to another perfect world from which we can extract the pure forms and make sense of it. Yet these activities account for most of the activity that goes on day to day in labor, production, and thought whether we admit it or not. The labyrinth has grown so difficult to navigate that the tools, conceptual and otherwise, received by history and culture are no longer are up to the task; and the task is quite simple: to prevent self-destruction, which will entail shifting both ourselves and our worldview into new beginnings.

Disentangling the labyrinth is not possible at the moment and no quick and easy answer will get us out of it; each answer is twisted and contorted to increase the scope and complexity of the labyrinth. The way forward is not simply to become fixated on an object or an end and strive toward it but, first and foremost, the way must be walked, the path moved along, one must stay alive. Dead ends, black holes, red herrings all conspire to attract towards them and direct the flow of movement inwards as heavy objects offering sanctuary and satisfaction. These dead ends conspiring together patternize bewildered bodies undergoing the experience of moving through the labyrinth. If one is to avoid these traps and snares, if one is to keep moving with the hope of the future held safely in one’s hands, if we are to survive, then the logic of the labyrinth – its rationality – must be understood and its construction seen in full view. This will involve an entire culture of beginnings and ends in science, philosophy, myth, and history to elaborate, but this involvement by no means implies a comprehensive view or assured knowledge of its object – an impossible endpoint within a task only concerned with beginning.

Guidance through the labyrinth is better equipped when one understands the place one occupies not as a vector point in a field of space but as mythical place with strange processes and spells being casted systematically without clear precision. A map and a GPS will help you get from point A to point B by drawing a zigzag line showing the way to your destiny (the destination), but we are not concerned with destinies and ends but creation and beginning. The act of creation cannot rely on a history of predictions whittling down chance and error to a minimum with their accompanying theories and devices while it also cannot avoid the place that this history has brought it to: it must be on one hand self-composed and on the other hand grateful for the gifts of history. To get through the labyrinth and not be drained of one’s creative capacities or excessively burdened by the sheer size of the world bearing down, recognizing the immense intricacy and complexity in the form of a singular name like ’the labyrinth’ will be of considerable utility. This word represents a place meant to induce the confusion, contradiction, and paradox: which is exactly the term needed to relieve an individual of this duress and reaffirm the quest for beginnings. For experience of being inside of the labyrinth is a common experience localizable in a given place, yet the effect of its walls and tricks is to remove this common element. Myth has a way of taking a problem and offering a fantastic reference for avoiding the frequent mistakes in handling socially relevant decisions pertaining to those problems. The labyrinth will be a touchstone for its invocation of confusion and frustration as a mind-state but also as a place-ground conspiring against the mind that seeks an object or a state to arrive at. There will be no such object-savior or tranquil state, however, skills will be sharpened as we make our way through this meticulously laid out place.

Enter Cornelius Castoriadis and his book Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Or, rather, enter the labyrinth. The gate appears suddenly and then disappears after the first step. “Was that a gate back there we just went through? Can’t be sure anymore.” If we could just retrace our steps back to the entrance we could leave the very same way in which we first came inside, but this has already become an illusion, for our questions demand answers and not mere rhetorical tricks of entertainment. Sophistry will no longer do for us after passion has entered the scene, a passionate love for wisdom has taken over us. Wisdom intoxicates with an ambiance we cannot see as an object before us and in our perception, yet it propels us farther than anything hitherto has been able to. It will sometimes feel as though this jolt of energy came from within us and was there all along, or that it was imbued in us from another world perfectly arranged and never ending. Allowing these thoughts to be our guide will plant us between two sturdy walls and make us stare upward at the lazy sky with only clouds and storms passing by to observe (with luck), or even worse: we will end up staring at one of those walls. One wall could be labeled ’inside’ the other ’outside’ and staying in the middle will not help us move forward to the next convergence if those
are our only options. They will not appear as walls constraining our motion and within which we navigate if they are our only points of reference: they will fill us with awe and admiration, these beautiful walls, these answers.

The love of wisdom undeniably demands answers, but we mock our lover by grabbing hold of it and holding it up to the sky. Soon wisdom will become disinterested and simply leave us behind as we try in vain to maintain our grip, and then the whole relationship simply falls apart to neither party’s benefit. To think with wisdom there needs to be some mutual agreement of coadaptation between the knowledge wisdom holds and our activity and our contribution to it. This knowledge has already come a long way, split off into many disciplines, and seeped into nearly every facet of social life whether one decides to enter into the amorous relationship or not. So in order to join up with its path of motion and influence its trajectory it is necessary to dip into the history knowledge that such wisdom has inspired. Only then does the path open up towards a convergence that strengthens both wisdom and ourselves:

“To think is precisely to shake up the perceptual institutions of the world and of society, and the imaginary social significations born by this institution. What is akin to perception in this case, is that when we consider thought which is already achieved, we confront the schema of background/figure, and the necessity of such a schema… original thought posits/creates other figures, brings about the existence a figure of that which could not previously so exist; and this involves, inevitably, a tearing apart and a recreation of the existing background, the given horizon.”

This inevitable schema of figure/ground factors into the current quest as the given monuments left over from history and which constitute the solid structure of the walls of the labyrinth we wade through. These walls are figures firmly placed in the traversable ground directing our movement and any creation of ours will inevitably recreate the same structure. But the movement and composition of flows that follow from such a creation that radically unearths a new figure is not so determined:

“A true relationship with such a thought strives to retrieve this moment of creative tearing apart, this new and different dawn in which at a single stroke thing take up another configuration in an unknown landscape. This in turn implies that, for us, this thought of the past becomes a new being under a new horizon, that we create it as object of our thought, in another relationship with its inexhaustible being.” (p.xxv)

Both the figure erected and the ground surveyed become newly minted only as the reproduction of a prior “tearing apart” exercised already before the act but always different from the old act. The act of creation summons all that is lying around and constructs something truly new on both a new ground and as a unique object. Though it be new in both figure and ground, we only add to the labyrinth, even if we cannot see beyond this slice of it. The labyrinth by itself is no figure or ground, no work of creation either, and is thought futilely if as a exclusively a figure as well as exclusively a ground; it is a place not to be mistaken for its concrete walls or floor which account for the lot of its material, but is nothing without them. It is a forest bewildering our sensibilities and wreaking havoc on our ideas, but it is a place nonetheless – a place we are undoubtably inside and within which we must construct.

The labyrinth is theory itself, and theory must always take into consideration the extending of thought to its limit while acknowledging the particularity of this act here, or that perception there. But as soon as one catches wind of these questions and the difference that distorts the certainty claimed by an experience or a true statement, doubt itself carries one to its limit in a skeptical stance of defensive parrying like an aikido warrior. As sure a substitute for knowledge as this internalized doubt may sound, it risks falling into disrespectful boasting against its opposition without which it would devoid of response for it only reacts to and channels away from. Truth must be admitted in circumstance *and allowed to push outward beyond historical contingency or else collapse – swallowed by the labyrinth. The intense desire for knowledge that compels actors to jog through it and to construct pieces of it is as inescapable as the labyrinth. Even if our desired object becomes a negative destruction of the labyrinth as its creative act of “dehiscence”, such a force will remain impotent without properly navigating it towards a convergence – the crossroads in the labyrinth. Once again, this means assuming the theoreticians mode of practice to link up with other actors likewise stifled by the labyrinth to build a contrary edifice in the opening.

We need not throw on his (and it almost always is his) robes and become fitted out to a priestly comfort in order to navigate through the labyrinth though. However protection will be needed. It’s better to thing of one’s appearance walking through the labyrinth as armor with an agonistic functionality: call it your arg-garments. Skillful rhetoric and sound tactics are only as good as conveyed to a collective group of some kind, and this necessarily involves visibility and showing up. Of course, neither appearance nor a concise plan will save you alone and only assuming the proper surface garments along with latching on to the proper flows within the labyrinth will together let way forward open.

“Theory exists neither as a ’view’ of that which is, nor as a systemic and exhaustive constitution or construction of that which may be thought, whether arrived at a single definitive moment or a process of gradual elaboration. No breach opens suddenly within the walls surrounding us, so that we can at last see the light of the sun which has always been there. And no more is there an harmonious edifice whose overall plan we shall progressively discover as we work on its construction.
There is theoretical activity, the making/doing of theory, which emerges only at a given historical moment. This human activity or undertaking is a social-historical project: the project of theory. To give an account of, and a reason for – logon didonai – everything: the world, the objects surrounding us, their ’laws’, ourselves, this activity itself… This is a pure fact: we can do no otherwise. We can do no otherwise, once the question has been raised. And we know that it has not always been raised, since the beginning of time, but that it happened at ’a given moment’.
If this is so, are our questions and our projects perhaps contingent? Yes, but for whom? For an absolute Spectator. But to speak or think this way, this absolute Spectator must himself be doing theory, a theory dependent on the categories of the necessary and the contingent. We are not and never shall be this absolute Spectator. Yet at the same time, and despite what has sometimes been said, we cannot prevent ourselves from adopting his fictitious standpoint, even if only to declare that he does not exist, or that he cannot be conceived without contradiction. This which we are speaking of as contingent – this which is neither contingent, nor necessary – this is our reality. Can we get out of it? It is obvious that we can’t. It is obvious that we can. Unless I succumb to delirium, I cannot but think that thought is a social-historical creation – and that this thought is true. And, unless I succumb to delirium, I cannot think either that all thought is true, or that, when it is, it is capable of accounting for its own truth; I cannot think either that thought is founded upon itself, or that it is transparent to itself.” (p.xix)

Delirium, absolute Spectator, a given historical moment, the activity of theory: our guide’s harassment of our intellect is the expression of tough love. For we can only follow him up to a point before that point disappears and we are left to make our own way. We assume the role of spectator only to learn how to abolish such passive receptivity, we learn the from the privileged volumes of history chalked full of mistakes and self-congratulation to imagine the blood-soaked result of victories, we learn to rationalize in the logos of our culture bearers to achieve gradual metamorphosis, we go into delirium to experience ourselves the raw form of Dionysian exuberance; but we can never sit comfortably again.

So strap on that armor and sharpen those arguments because now that the labyrinth’s illusions, traps, and blockages are better visible we must meet perhaps our most formidable agents of anti-theory: Modern Scientists.

On Levi Bryant’s ‘Axioms for a Dark Ontology’

Levi Bryant has drawn up a brief manifesto of a nihilist reflection on the world and life’s place in the one and only world as a mere accident. His materialism in the matters of human belief brings forth succinctly and strikingly a conception of the world as void that is reminiscent of Lucretius. World here functions as a pure void, an empty space on which the dance of matter takes place. This distinction of matter and world seems to recreate the full/empty binary which then is grafted on to existence as a whole, or, the universe. The manifesto is well worth a read and long contemplation, as well as a follow up from arranjames.

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/axioms-for-a-dark-ontology/

http://attemptsatliving.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/levi-bryants-axioms-for-a-dark-ontology/

But must we abide by these terms and this conceptual framework? The world conceived as it is here is doomed from the start to void and nothingness, which is clearly the only conclusion that could follow from this conceptual treatment. When imagining the world as a single unified place (and this must be an exercise in the imagination, or perhaps an intellectual excursus within a conceptual model), it could not possibly be full and perfectly meaningful to the point of which a perfectly understood significance could give cultural actors access to it. The world is at once occupying the figure and the ground, holding both the indisputable ’thereness’ of existence as object and also the setting, place, or environment upon which all objects dwell. Lying within this word is the collapsed distinction which at first allows for a meaningful object to become a thing under consideration with its own properties, tendencies, structures, and relations to other objects. An object must always ’be’ amidst a backdrop, a backdrop which tries to attain distinctly objective status as a cognizant thing when the unification meant for an object is “outsourced” to its own ground.

This linguistic movement of a binary opposition (figure/ground) is accompanied by the enormous successes of scientific institutions which have brought along with them a discourse rife with philosophical undertones of disinterested objectivism. However, these matters are largely ignored by today’s scientists and left to the “lofty intellectuals” so they can do their work of infinite knowledge production in their secure, unchallenged ’world’. Their experiments, results, and the method so fruitful in producing useful technologies for their nations do indeed prove themselves over and over again to be of great worth. Though the dis-coveries of these material things in their patterned movement can lay claim to truth in the minimally predictive sense, when science moves to theory and, either consciously or unconsciously, harkens back to the beginnings of science in the certainty, finality, and universality it must (if sincerity and honesty is given to the words and concepts with which they construct those theories) admit to itself that it is engaging in philosophy. Recourse is always given to a history of actors, experimenters, and observers that carry science from one new mode to the next, and the unifying thread of science does indeed have a history that goes as far back as when ’physics’ was called ’natural philosophy’.

Bringing up the paradoxes and entanglements of science with regards to the nihilistic refusal of meaningful belief in the world is can be of some utility here since it problematizes both subjective commitment and disinterested (supposedly non-subjective) knowledge. If the separation of subject and object would be held apart so firmly, the subject would be forced to have as its object of conscious adherence (ideology if you want) the forced choice between a foundational social/ego or bare objects/things. I believe things are more complicated and intertwined along with Merleu-Ponty. The reflective and inward-folding that a solitary writer is privy to can be also recognized as an object in the “mind-space” so as to balance the linguistic relationship. A sentence that makes sense, written down or spoken between those within a common discourse must be the result of an actor in a performance – and on a stage. Ideas are inextricable in thinking about the world and any of its particular objects and we must place them some*where* – as we must do with objects, placing them in the world. However, when the object tries to become its own ground, to take over the whole stage as it were, we get an idea that attempts to both produce its own existence and declare for itself nothing at all.

This is an extremely important topic, since I have both flirted with nihilism and remain very open to the Spinozist-Lucretian-Nietzsche Delueze thread that treats nothingness as nothing (as a mere linguistic nothing and not a source of creation or attachment). This all set within the problem of global warming and the threat of ecological collapse which I want to hold out as avoidable. There is so much still yet to be done.

Having gone this far into the labyrinth of theory I should make something clear: these thoughts gave been germinating in my mind for quite some time now from various sources. But those consistent bloggers have made it seem like there was a community of participants willing to read what I wrote and I owe you all thanks for inspiring me to experiment with this mode of expression. It is very strange indeed having so many ideas floating around both the Internet and my face to face encounters and this reassures me that I am onto the right track with regard to the topics, even if the content is disputable. A great deal of my influence has come from reaching out into other spheres and keeping running debates with friends and fellow autodidacts, but blogs allow rough thought to just “get out there” and be seen. The books that I’m drawing from in this piece which I haven’t yet been able to make good enough essays about yet are Cornelius Castoriadis’s Crossroads in the Labyrinth (a staggering work of theoretical genius), Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests, and Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. I’ll get around to coming up with more substantial works on these books soon since they have been so educational and I want to share.

As a teaser: the social actor is inextricably bound up with yet opposed to Nature. Nature is less a world than it is a labyrinth. The place, region, or territory is neither neutral or empty. The place of nature (seeing as it is that the social must juxtapose with nature) is the forest.

“There’s just no time for these thoughts…”

As a philosopher trying to keep up with the many strains and schools that diverge and often fight with each other, I’ve had to spend much time sitting for long periods of time and reading. The foreign, heady, and counter-intuitive ideas and discourses from the distant past need a good deal of personal reflection and distancing from the everyday, common speak with friends and family, so a lot of this philosophical practice requires isolation. Breaks from reading are generally spent spacing out by staring off into the ceiling of a cafe or library to more thoroughly reorient myself to the strange ideas of epochs gone past. But these writings left behind as great monuments by those who took conceptual problems seriously are extremely powerful, so powerful that they have reorganized our societies, our beliefs, matter itself…

There is a disconnect between the solitary or purely discursive intellectual-philosophical activity and the great potential for change which these ideas (not immediately tangible things) can produce. Making this connection has been very hard in my experience, as many people have settled on the simple prioritization of practice over theory. Be it the result of the acceleration of physical activity and the effective mobilization of the labor-work force to produce or the inability to perceive ideas that have organized this increased activity, so many people (even among those who theorize for a living!) just don’t think of theory or critique as valuable activity. It is not a worthwhile endeavor, for the fruits of this labor do not appear soon enough, one desires instant gratification (and perhaps too many need that reward to continue surviving) and there just isn’t time to wait for ideas to run their course and take the grand effect of global change they invoke. There has actually been a wealth of new and wonderful theory in these past decades, but the disconnect between the ideas that change along with the times and the critical mass they are trying to reach has accompanied the disconnect between the removed theoretical activity and the wide subjects which they deal with. Must this be the case? Must great ideas be doomed to take their effect on the field of play too late?

I’m told that when at dinner parties of times gone by, or whatever social gathering substitutes for one, philosophers who makes themselves known would be asked: “Oh! Well tell me the meaning of life then Mr. Philosopher!” This would be slightly uncomfortable for the philosopher and they would reply in turn that it’s not that simple or pull out some similarly disarming wise-crack. To this day nobody has asked me about the meaning of life when I express my chief interest and area of study. Instead, the almost universal response is: “What do you do with that?” Both are meant to put some pressure on the person claiming a devout love of wisdom, as they will inevitably feel belittled by the one working with things that perplex them, but the ’meaning of life’ challenge is infinitely more desirable than ’what can you do with that?’. I yearn to be asked the life question, but it just never comes. I could actually give some of my ideas on where life is going, how it was formed, the disparity in definitions given by different scientific disciplines, how earth’s ecosystem adjusts itself like a living organism itself, how life might not require any meaning to be valuable and self-generate its own meaning… But instead I get someone asking a vastly dumbed-down gut-reaction question about what *I* can *Do* with this knowledge. As if it was not already an action itself or needed the justification of applicability in the job market to be worthwhile.

This contrast between the two dinner party questions to the philosopher is telling of our age. And to demonstrate how worthy of an activity philosophy is, I’m going to learn from this development and ponder: why do people now think of bare activity (vs. theory) when confronted by a philosopher instead of life and meaning?

Deleuze and the Advertisers

What say you on Philosophy and Marketing Gilles Deleuze?

“Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: “This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers.” Information and creativity, concept and enterprise: there is already an abundant bibliography. Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event… The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced Critique with sales promotion.”

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.10

Creating concepts, a painstaking labor of philosophical invention, an expression of intensified yet drawn out attention on a deep problem, becomes the work of an ad-man looking to turn a profit. The cultivation of something new out of the old that is both an ode to the great ones of the past and a monument that goes beyond the narrow concern of mere Time is now a data entry point meant for as many eyes as can gaze upon it.

The consumption of the concepts is made increasingly more vociferous under the careful craft of the graphic designer, the copy writer, the editor, the marketer. We feast with our eyes on the spectacle of splendor created by the genius in the skyscraper. So in-tune with the act of invention is the artist of abstractions that he pulls the strings of the eager masses to the point of them following him along, following him ever more along his extra-terrestrial trail of joyful seduction. They never see him. He blends in ubiquitously with his minions of desire even while they follow him into his thoughts, always on the cusp of some clever production thanks to his conceptual clarity.

Wearing no robe or crown, sitting in no house or court, the advertiser walks through the crowds just like his other fellow citizens doing their jobs. But they follow his thoughts more surely than any devout subject before them, reaching violently for that slice of heaven, that moment of bliss, before returning inward for the next go-around.
The mass is never one, the individual always initiates the pursuit of its object.
The mass is never one, it is divided into selfs with no use of conformity.
The mass is never one, our differences make us special.
The mass is never one, the horror at the potential for such destruction!
Going out on the streets, going out to the show, going out with a bang, but always going back in.

Self generation is the well spring of eternal creation: the Ad man has learned this well, even if not disciplined by an elder – especially without such discipline. The mind is a canvas on which to paint furious concepts – all of which are at one’s disposal. Gratitude flows rapidly into the mind, measured in shear stock. The mind is by turns championed and questioned repeatedly as a new project is always on the horizon. The work to be done, full of pride and determination; the warmth of the ownmost – I can always come back. The mind now a heart-beat.

The Advertiser shares the philosophical Illumination with you, in perfect communication.

You see? He’s not entirely selfish. Among them traversing, bestowing the gift of the concept in plain sight. But the mind keeps searching, wanting, demanding; and the advertiser provides more, forever more.

See? All you had to do was reach inside and pull it right out. No need for a fuss.

How’s this?

I grew up saturated with advertisements, then I found philosophy.
Then came Mad Men: a philosophical show about advertisers.
Now I write of philosophy and its assumption by advertising days before the season premiere.
Therefore I am advertising for free on my philosophy blog for a TV show about advertisers.
I have come back to advertising, as a philosopher against advertising.

Watching this will make it all better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) Get it on Netflix.

Speculations on Obama's Brain Initiative

Reblogged from Footnotes 2 Plato:

Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health and author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), introduces President Obama as the "scientist-in-chief." Collins' "BioLogos" theory is a brand of theistic evolution I have to admit I am not all that familiar with. But I do think he is a good choice to head the NIH since he believes in the compatibility of science and religion, as the majority of Americans seem to.

Read more… 817 more words

Thank you so much for this post Matt. The neutral objectivity that scientists and materialists often lay claim to hides much of the social pretensions from with which they are operating. In this instance, the President of the United States is digging deep into the minds of his subjects and carrying a ideological bias toward economic efficiency in plain site. Separating the religious from the scientific is not enough. Obama's alleged "Pragmatism" does not account for Capitalist apologetics that turn the scientific pursuit of knowledge into normative political knowledge for an Imperial superpower. With a near-perfect understanding of the brain, the limits to keeping masses complacent would be extended farther than almost anyone could see. In the world of capitalism, research on consciousness via reductivist neuron tinkering has clear dangers for anyone who understands the power dimension of politics, but this is becoming less obvious to the lot of humanity.

BRAINS... BRAAAAINS... [economic growth] BRAAAAAINS!!!

Century of the Self Documentary

Here is a link to the full BBC documentary by Adam Curtis The Century of the Self. It is a kind of historical, factual, British version of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. It details how Sigmund Freud’s idea of the unconscious drives was promoted in America and into advertising which was then used to control entire populations of people. The central idea of the doc is that these unconscious drives that Freud “discovered” became so popular and a part of mainstream culture in large part thanks to two figures: Anna Freud and his nephew Edward Bernais. Anna Freud practically sold her father’s ideas to the mass market, and Edward Bernais used them in principle for mass marketing schemes, pacifying the “dangerous” crowd.

It is extremely matter of fact and traces these developments all the way up into the Clinton administration’s use of them for his presidential election campaign. The entire century is taken into account, with the political implications for manipulating mass desire showing throughout the twentieth century. This is a Must Watch.