Fox News and Ideology

andy pink, exhausted, ready to bludgeon his bird to death —

i was up all night and watched an hour of fox news, which i sometimes do when i'm depressed. fox news is so transparent in its ideology (meaning: values, mores, policy, politics, position, and so on) that it almost gives ideology a bad name. fox's version of ideology is its transparency — it's all very obvious to the viewer what it is selling. there is no veil, no hidden agenda, no suberfuge, it's just what it is: present in its ideological coding that any idiot who watches the network would be able to discern. in contrast, zizek describes ideology as a suture — its purpose or function is to fill in the gaps in reality, so what matters is narrative and mis-en-scene — the story that is corrupted or inconsistent or illogical or irrational. for zizek, ideology has to make sense, it has to suture the viewer (citizen) to the world in such a way that the whole of the social edifice makes sense to him. fox's modality of ideology is just the presentation of bad values, mores, policy, politics, position, and so on — it takes no effort to understand or comprehend its ideology; it is prechewed food, essentially. but zizek's more nuanced — and wholly different — version of ideology is that it is there to make sense of the world, not obscure it or block it or even to represent it. ideology is "making-sense" in the world, and this is precisely, as i have written about, what grammatology makes impossible. by the signifier, there is no logic, sense, rationality, or any kind of suture of the real into the symbolic. overlapped, the symbolic attempts to "answer" the real, making sense of the inconsistency and irrationality of the message, or of the social edifice itself. so, in watching fox news, as i did overnight for an hour, i received a false version of reality — whereas for zizek what you get in ideology is a true version of reality, its purpose is to fill the lack in the place of the other, to make "society" appear rather than to, as in fox's mode of ideology, lie, fib, contort, and so on. for zizek, ideology (like fantasy) is the mise-en-scene of the way we understand the world truly, not its false representation in code.

jeff and i had a nice walk on cambridge street this morning after i spent the evening up, unable to sleep. this would ordinarily be the imminence of mania, but i got enough sleep, ultimately, and i'm generally doing very well despite the hacker stalking that is rich's current occupation. love the kid. i was thinking, it's certainly a mismatch, the two of us, but i think this is all in the charm of the pairing. our being-in-the-world and being-with-others is very much a performance, as we would look quite odd — a clash — in our presentation in the world together. but i like this. i think the reason i proposed disney world is that it would be such a place to heighten the contrast between the two of us. we'd document checking in at the hojo, we'd document going on the rides and seeing the oogling, we'd document the sex and the chatter afterward. it's really such a great match.

i'll tell you about okcupid, which i recently rejoined after a massive hassle in which they demanded by phone number and, almost, my social security number and passport id. the only thing that you are allowed to do on okcupid for free is look and message. you can't see who has looked at you, you can't discern likes, you can't see who has passed you over in the great game of pass, and so on. i have 63 likes after about 4 days and i have no idea who these assholes are. i think if i ran a self match-making site that i would at least make free the possibility of seeing who "likes" you. as it stands now, all i can do is msg various blokes who have no interest in viewing my profile let alone sending me a msg. i did write a very brief amusing profile over there the other day, with the master signifier of "nerf ball" as the organizing principle of the text. i think this profile — which would otherwise be overlooked — is a bit of a gem, and unlike my older version is readable and consumable, it's pithy and brief. "brevity is the soul of wit," as was exposed in shakespeare. grindr and archer both advance an apprehension of the sender, okcupid is just dead on arrival.

the memoir is coming along fine, i've changed some of the dates, which has made it a bit arduous to organize temporally. of the vignettes, which are all but 2-3 pages, some of them are winners but not all. i'm hoping that the form of memoir is intriguing enough to convince a reader that it's worth the time. i'm a bit surprised that 180 entries is taking some page width, but i guess there's a lot of blank space in there. i've decided against dedicating it to rich and instead going with a patrick dedication. rich is new (2 years) and patrick was a longer go and more intense, and comtemporary with the texts.

god, a mismatch is if we make a go —

Andy Pink

my gad, a long time ago