Slogans, Subjects, and Sivilized Men

By Chris Chrappa

Gilles Deleuze said that the fundamental unit of language is the "mot d'ordre;" the "order-word" or "slogan." Since most people aren't concerned with linguistics or the formal study of language, this seems worthy enough of consideration. Yet, to the alchemists of language, Deleuze's conjecture is a barbarism.

And you know what? It sure is.

But you know what else? The best definition of truth is what it does.

And what does it do? It hurts.

Then what does this imply? It is barbaric.

Deleuze, we'd do well to note, was no moron, and he was well aware of the human condition perpetuated through the channels of publishing houses, television, cinema, journalism, and so-called information technology.

"The human condition"-we inquire-"what's that?" In the case of our newly developed police state, it's an axiom, an assumption, what Jacques Barzun scathingly called the Paragon Complex.

We can't digest normalcy. Call it a "barbaric truth" about us (though with our impeccably deduced definition laid out above, "barbaric truth" is redundant). We like our information like our food, smothered in fried extremity with heart-stopping, tasty detail. And, like our food, our information is loaded with additives that murder any thrust for vivacity one could get out of them. So much so that, in much media-work these days, there is nothing but additives.

We detest anything under-sensationalized and find it Godotiangly boring if it doesn't in some way involve the six specimen known as: superlatives. Remarkable are the first, the last, the youngest, the oldest, the largest, and the smallest. In other words, anything that is "the most" or "al-most" the most, is fit for print and general imbibing by the public mind.

Just look at the little blurbs Crispin quoted from the NY Times in his last article. Look at the slips of books or the covers of movie boxes. Look at the way commodities of all shape, size, and form are unremittingly held up to our tear-filled eyes with, as Sting said, "every breath we take." I'll be damned if this doesn't give credence to Deleuze's barbaric theory. Slogans, in their most obvious forms, are paragons.

A shining example of this Complex-all additives, no natural juice-is a recent ad(ditive) by Volvo brandishing their new, apparently unexpected, SUV. In this horrendously severe sixty seconds we see a family of four driving in a strange land, the son seeing a sea-monster of some sorts, the daughter a pack of unicorns, and the parents who else but the King himself, Elvis. And, if that isn't enough to set your consumptive appetite afire, this magical car ride is punctuated by a heading which reads "The First…," under which appears a flashing list of crap no one can read or give a hoot about. "The first…" is plastered over our eyes, stamped on the screen while all the great details shoot by like unimportant saltlets on a juicy french fry. The maxim is scrumptious enough: "just eat it!" And eat it we shall.

More unnerving than all of this, however, is the way our men of honor-politicians-parrot slogans and thought-cliché's at the public, who parrots them back in what I would call the most seriously perverse game of sing-a-long imaginable. Did I say the most…? Most assuredly.

The temptation to hyper-inflate every little thing we come across or discover is long gone. These days, it's just a fact. The French psychologist and fellow spectacle-monger Jacques Lacan had an appropriately dour view of the whole phenomenon, telling us not to get our proverbial "shit" together, but rather to "enjoy" our "symptoms."

It seems to me, though, we've been enjoying our symptoms for much too long-we'll even reproach a movie, like The Bank-to take a recent example-and chastise it for not being "realistic" enough. As if one could tell you what "real" situation a "realistic" film would re-enact, and the reasons why it is so "real."

Oh, but one can tell you. Just listen. Put your ear to the ground.

A "real" situation, so it goes, appears to involve some mishmash of sentimental bathos, appropriate levels of "humanness" or, it makes no difference, flawed and questionable people, and-- this is the most important criteria-- nothing too extraordinary. The last of which would seem to contradict our running hypothesis, wouldn't it?

On the contrary, the yearning for the "human" and the mundane is a desire for the most real, the most human, the most mundane. A few years ago voices would have raised to object, but after Survivor and its progeny they will now kindly shutup.

What's wrong with all of this, you ask? Nothing inherently, just a conception of "reality" that involves thought-cliches, paragon complexes, and mots d'ordre. And nothing else.

Give us grandiose, blatant fantasy, or give us bone-hard, docu-drama reality. The tendency is to sensationalize everything, right on down to a few personas on an island somewhere (Survivor), or some "random" youths in a house (the Real World), such that nothing escapes the camera and no aspect of our normalcy is left untrammeled. In other words, instead of simply feeling the typical disappointment that the apocalypse isn't anywhere on the horizon, we begin to feel disappointed that our mundane, everyday lives aren't televised. Guy Debord called it over thirty years ago. The Society of the Spectacle.

Let us return to the slogans.

Take a word, any word, like "freedom," for example. Politicians parrot it as if the story of our attaining it is long over, and all that's left to do now is extend its fortunes to the rest of the unfortunate world, and tinker with its cogs a bit at home. The irony of the chirpy singsongs after September 11 about how free and wonderful we are after all, is betrayed by the trembling voices who join in the fervor. "Yeah, we're a free nation," we sing, "but there's just this terrorist problem…" One wonders if we ever stopped to think what havoc a word like freedom has wreaked in the hands of America. One wonders, I hope, if we ever considered that our freedom may very well have extended its benevolence to birthing its own potential annihilation. A very special benevolence that would be.

We can't stop with politicians though, for the people sing freedom too, and have even more slogans to fill in their stanzas with. But--Freedom from what? To do what? How much freedom? Can you measure it? More to the point: how does our freedom work? How was it attained? How is it used? It is no platitude to say that one man's freedom is another's oppression, and if everyone were unconditionally free it'd be a total nightmare. Not to speak of impossible. Sort of like it's polar opposite, "terrorism."

America has recently begun a "war on terrorism" in which it is asserted that we will effectively "end terrorism." The sheer lunacy of such a promise, such a mindless, thoughtless shard of sensation cooking logorrhea, can only be a recipe for disaster. A disaster which has no need of ending in blood or extreme violence, perhaps finding its finale in more slogan-ridden minds and automated youth-which, of course, will probably end in blood and violence.

Nobody doubts the importance of freedom, liberty, what have you; but instead of always seeing things as "for" or "to" or "from" something, why not see their contingency and think about "freedom with"… If less sensational, it may be more accurate, and provide more sensible judgments for difficult situations. And, naturally, a more sensible public mind.

In any case, we may be free from slavery and free to vote (if we're not below the poverty line, not under 18, etc.) but we are not without restrictions on where to go once we are freed, who to vote for, and so on. Freedom with restriction-that's the way its been and the way it always will be. The other categorical, Kantian freedom we envision is a pernicious pipe-dream we literally suck the poison fumes from. "The problem," says Deleuze, "always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated, and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it." By which he meant: create better conditions for stating problems instead of clamoring over the ones we're instructed to find already-made solutions for, like math.

The thing with slogans and thought-cliché's, we are slowly learning, is that they somehow seem more necessary, absolutely necessary, and we rarely stop to let their utter vacuity give us pause for reflection. If postmodern nazis seem pretty repellant now, it is only because the black hole of humanist discourse had struck an equally repellant chord with them. Not that we should always shy away from extremes, rather we should not plunge into them without testing the waters, lest we drown in our haste.

Disgust with the average and the common, including the thought-cliché's and order-words, often leads intelligent people to seek out the first extreme they come across. Sometimes its fundamentalist Christianity, sometimes its jargon-ridden theory, sometimes its neo-nazism, sometimes its solipsistic existential alienation. The common, we might say, are entertained and informed by the sensational; the uncommon are disgusted and nauseated by it, leading them to seek it out and become sensational. Either way, the sensational becomes the norm., and we forget how to deal with the sheer jargon-less mundanity of footsteps on a sidewalk, a few hours without television or chatting with an old friend, or with watching television and chatting with an old friend. To call a spade a spade is one thing; to see a spade as such is entirely another.

One last note as a nugget for thought. The police state operates through fear and illusion, but also through gratification (or at least its ugly twin, discharge). A chasm runs between the powerful and the powerless, and the way we conceive of freedom is tied to our conceptions of power.

To be free is to have the power to do anything, within reason. "As in heaven, so on earth" the saying goes; and the model of domination and obeying we envision behind the structures of society is no less behind the structures of subjects, agents, and consumers-- as individuals.

Descartes made the dual subject a quality of humankind, and ever since we've been marred by the cogito, the "I think."

History lesson: The cogito, or the "I think," is associated with spirit and might be called now-a-days the "real you," your "essential self." This is the subject of enunciation. Any other subject, such as the "I walk," the "I kill," the "I go to meet my wife at the supermarket," is inessential and contingent, and is associated with the body, flesh, matter. This is the subject of the statement.

The model here is simple: there are two subjects, one of enunciation (the soul) which dominates or orders, and one of the statement (the body) which is dominated or takes orders. The former is One, since it is unified, like a "fascism in the head" Foucault once remarked about; the latter is Many, since it is determined by its context, and morphs accordingly. The one and the many. God and man. Spirit and body. White and black. Powerful and powerless.

On this model, when you say "me" or "I," you are actually speaking for two (a one and a many). A real, essential, subject, and a corrupt, inessential subject. Thus, "I as a human being" are on the same ground as you, brother, born free with only two certainties (if you don't know them I envy you). But… "I as an advertiser" must deceive you, "I as a police officer" must arrest you, "I as a politician" must dupe, lie, and spit vacuous order-words at you…it is "my duty," you see.

We have a slogan for this double cheeseburger, too: equality. "Sure, we're equal insofar as we're human, my man, but according to my duty I must…" You get the picture.

It's an impressive edifice we've got here. The more you obey, the freer you are. The more you do your duty, the more you are a true, autonomous, liberated subject. Power and freedom are drunk with each other.

The more we couple this mess with capitalism and its drive to make everything meaningless except what it designates, with its checkmarks and white-out, the more we will become the most insanely deluded population in humanity's short history.

"Freedom" and "equality," whatever they were before, have been stripped of all referents and content, instead wielded as political weapons in sophistical hands, striking the "that's o.k.!" gongs in our droning minds. Capitalism, its benefits duly noted, has an unnerving tendency to replace thought and Intellect (as Barzun called it) with censors and police of all kinds (be they narcs, municipal-, thought-, teacher-, parent-, whatever). So instead of cutting to the heart of the matter, like Kubrick did with the "lime" statement in Full Metal Jacket, we have little beepers that receive the mots d'ordre and either chime or alarm. Take care to seek out the beeper instead of the cogito, the biggest chime of all.

But then again, what do I know? I'm just an average college student with typical furor adolescentium, letting my anger out on the world.

If I were the youngest and most astute though, I'd be headlines.

My adolescent anger would be the anchor bringing me down to earth, since the masses can't be trusted not to deify me or care about my writing if it's not asserted first that I am… what? Human.

Which means? Flawed and screwed-up.

Which tells us? An important truth.

Which is? Absolutely barbaric.