Desiring Machine

A lot is being made of Stephen Colbert’s recent performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Links on You Tube:

Colbert Roasts Bush Part 1

Colbert Roasts Bush Part 2

Colbert Roasts Bush Part 3

There is a lot of enthusiasm about his peformance. Many are hailing it for the courageous and scathing commentary he provided right in front of Bush. I certainly found it humorous and full of wit and irony. It was a compelling piece of satire. But I think the enthusiasm is a little overblown in my opinion. I think there is a danger here of the administration incorporating criticism and diffusing it by appropriation. This is and has been a consistent pattern through out the Bush administration’s tenure. They can glibbly acknowledge all the criticism but simultaneously supress and ignore it through a clever propaganda technique of affect. We must remember that we live in a highly advanced marketing culture. This is not to say that marketing itself is evil or bad, just highly affective and sophisticated.

It is fine to enjoy the performance of Colbert but we must also ask ourselves is it really effective dissent? I regularly watch the Colbert Report but I always get an uneasy feeling with the mode of comedic irony as he deploys it in the show. It achieves a profound level of subtlety through its heigthened and obvious mimicry of the O’Reilly Factor. But sometimes I get the feeling something is lost in translation. I think I know Colbert’s point of view but is he really saying what I think he is saying? For me the best and most revealing moments of the show are when he interviews his guests. You never quite know what is going to happen. You often have right wing guests who find themselves in complete agreement with Colbert’s absurd utterances, and then there is the often bewildered liberal who doesn’t quite know what to make of the interview. The liberal is often left with one of two responses: just remain silent and dumbfounded by what is coming from Colbert’s mouth or else try to stick to the script of their talking points and continue on making their points regardless of what Colbert asserts. Jesse Jackson was a great example of this latter approach. But sadly the effect is really not substantively different than what you get on the normal talk shows like O’Reilly or Hannity. The liberal guest appears weak and inaffectual and the right winger appears utterly sympathetic within the context of the show. I don’t want to make presumptions about the basic intelligence of the average TV viewer or voter, and that is not my pupose here. It is not a question of dumbing down but rather the functioning of a higher order propaganda model that works on the level of affect to borrow a term from Deleuze.

In fact there is a great discussion of this phenomenon over at K-Punk vis-a-vis Ronald Reagan. Brian Massumi makes an interesting comment about Reagan’s style as The Great Communicator:

[W]hat is astonishing is that Reagan wasn’t laughed and jeered off the campaign podium, and was swept into office, not once but twice. It wasn’t that people didn’t hear his verbal fumbling or recognize the incoherence of his thoughts. They were the butt of constant jokes and news stories. And it wasn’t that what they lacked on the the level of verbal coherence was glossed over by the seductive fluency of his body image. Reagan was more famous for his polyps than his poise, and there was a collective fascination with his faltering health and regular shedding of bits and pieces of himself. The only conclusion is that Reagan was an effective leader not in spite of but because of his double dysfunction. He was able to produce ideological effects by non-ideological means, a global shift in the political direction of the United States by falling apart. His means were affective.

And then there is this analysis of the ultimate failure of a dadaist protest flyer passed out at the 1980 GOP convention titled Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan:

What does this neo-Dadaist act of would-be subversion tell us? In one sense, it has to be hailed as the perfect act of subversion. But, viewed another way, it shows that subversion is impossible now. The fate of a whole tradition of ludic intervention - passing from the Dadaists into the Surrealists and the Situationists - seems to hang in the balance. Where once the Dadaists and their inheritors could dream of invading the stage, disrupting what Burroughs - still very obviously a part of this heritage - calls the “reality studio” with logic bombs, now there is no stage - no scene, Baudrillard would say - to invade. For two reasons: first, because the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical, and, second, because the distinction between stage and offstage has been superceded by a coolly inclusive loop of fiction: Reagan’s career outstrips any attempt to ludically lampoon it, and demonstrates the increasingly pliability of the boundaries between the real and its simulations. For Baudrillard, the very attacks on “reality” mounted by groups such as the Surrealists function to keep the real alive (by providing it with a fabulous, dream world, ostensibly entirely alternative to but in effect dialectically complicit with the everyday world of the real).

Both of these analyses of Reagan on the K-Punk site illustrate what I would call an absorption principle of criticism. There is no outside from which to criticize only an interplay of internal affects. Everything is already known about the administration so nothing new is added as a disruption. Criticism does not assume the force of disruption. Of course this presumes that the possibility of disruption even exists. This method of deflection has been quite effectively deployed for propagandistic effect. I do not doubt that Stephen Colbert is sincere in his satire but I also doubt that it is mere accident either that he was selected for this role. Seems like a logical choice. Down in the polls, with an administration slowly losing control before midterm elections how do they fight back. The only form of mass media criticism seems to come from comedy central and the daily show and colbert report. The logical solution is to incorporate these forces make them familiar to the administration. On the one hand this invites stinging criticism but it also limits it placing it within a context. I have no insight or knowledge that this is an an explicit strategy for PR effect but it seems to me to follow a pattern that the right wing has effectively deployed in the past.

Bush has received lots of criticism for the way he talks. Bush in an quite effective way entirely diffused the criticisms by embracing the persona that is criticized. Geoffrey Nunberg makes a great analysis of this trend in his book Going Nucular: Language Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times. In it he makes this observation about Bush:

No president has taken more flak over his language than George W. Bush–not Eisenhower, not even Harding. That’s understandable enough; Bush’s malaprops can make him sound like someone who learned the language over a bad cell-phone connection. “My education message will resignate among all parents”; “A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illnes.”

The columnists and late-night talk-show monologists usually take those errors as the occasions for mirth, rather than concern, the linguistic equivalents of Gerald Ford’s pratfalls. (p. 60)

Should it be any surprise that Bush has taken this seeming flaw and made it a strength? Reagan seemed to deploy it for great affect, Bush is perhaps just following in the model with a little more zeal. The question that Nunberg asks is what does it reveal about the president? Does he know better or is it cynically employed rhetorically? Is it a mere typo or a “thinko”?

There are two kinds of missteps, the typos and the thinkos. Typos are the processing glitches that intercede between a thought and its expression. They can make you look foolish, but they aren’t really the signs of an intellectual or ethical deficiency, the way thinkos are. It’s the difference between a sentence that expresses an idea badly and a sentence that expresses a bad idea. (p. 59)

Returning to Colbert. With Colbert’s performance we see the satire elevated to a higher order with a more thorough mimesis. Colbert’s show is unlike the regular tendency of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show where the specific misteps and typos/thinkos are ruthlessly recounted and remixed for comedic effect. Colbert takes it to the next logical level and plays it straight. The irony is not encapsulated in a single utterance but the entire performance assumes uncritically the manner and ideological tone of the right wing. It suceeds by pushing the discourse to logical extremes while being careful to not stray from format parameters. The only distinction between Colbert and his object of satire Bill O’Reilly is the outlandishness and bravado of Colbert’s delivery. Just like the relationship between a drag queen and a woman, where the queen is more feminine than the female, Colbert is more O’Reilly than O’Reilly himself. Colbert creates a new hybridization subjectivity. This subjectivity congeals on the level of affect. Deleuze’s concept of affect can be defined as follows:

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter betweeen the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies). (Thousand Plateaus xvi)

Colbert’s satirical routine might be considered an affection encapsulated in a simulation. The subjectivity and body is of the right wing ideologue. The encounter is between the ideology and its satire. The result is a new thing not quite satire not quite right wing mantra. I am uncertain of the outcome of this hybrid. On the one hand I read Colberts performance as hysterically funny because it gives body to everything that is perfectly obvious in the right wing point of view. But on the other hand I am uncertain of its consequence. The delivery is so subtle that the participants can rarely figure out what is going on. Is the presidential power merely allowing or more sinisterly incorporating the criticism? Perhaps this is the perfect kind of theater for our age. It reveals everything but changes nothing. This it certainly seems is a common trend in the Bush spin machine. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is the lesson the administration has seemed to learn with respect to manipulating the public. On the face of it the Colbert court jester performance in the presence of the president doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. The only thing novel about it is the physical proximity of the performance to the body of the president. Colbert alludes to Rocky boxing metaphors almost as if he is half expecting the president to jump up and punch him personally for being so forth right in his “truthiness”. But it seems like there can be a deception if we become too comfortable with this state of affairs. The propaganda doesn’t work on an intellectual level but rather on an affective level. It is reinforced by what it incorporates. There is no novelty in the dissent. Everyone already knows and continues the game comfortable that nothing changed in the process. In some sense nothing more can be said because it has already been said. And even if the rhetoric obtains to absurb levels it is still perfectly bounded because it conforms to a mode that cannot be disrupted ideologically or even physically.