draft notes on the destiny of the jurist(media)
#spectacle
#state
#jurist
#serres
#dumezil
I’ve been wondering recently whether a modification isn’t required in my understanding of Georges Dumezil and his definitive ideological analysis of Indo-European mythology, specifically of the concept of political sovereignty which has three poles, the king, the jurist and the warrior. For whilst I have always tended to accept the proposition put forward by Deleuze and Guattari that suggests that science has supplanted religion as the juridicial pole, (as the pole of legitimation which legitimates the ideological and repressive operations and structures of our societies) and the king even in our liberal parliamentary democracies has remained fundamentally unchanged as the despotic pole, as power, as executive. Clearly it is possible to argue that the structure has remained fundamentally unchanged. But I’m wondering whether in the light of the work I am doing in relation to the spectacle, to the mass media whether I shouldn’t actually be arguing more forcefully that the media, the spectacle itself has recently supplanted both science and religion to become the jurist-media, the acknowledged legislator, the creator of pacts which the ‘king’ is beholden to… the jurist-media, the jurist-spectacle. The ideological functions of the king-executive and the jurist-media combine into the main apparatus of sovereignty, name it the late-capitalist State if you wish, “…it proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority. It is the a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum…”
The following quote from Michel Serres begins to suggest the scope of what is at stake here… ” I will now mediate Dumezil’s three stages and their respective endings. The enlightenment tried to liberate us from Jupiter, (the magician-king) from the grip of the divine. Was it successful ? After the second world conflict, a few talented and well-intentioned men in turn invented a Europe without borders, trying to liberate their nations from the stranglehold of Mars, (Warriors,the war-machine) that is the mortal horrors of war. Will they succeed ? Will we now have to free ourselves from the confrontations unleashed by Quirinus, I mean by production, work, depletion of resources, trade, the economy, and volatile circulation of goods and signs? Which new enlightenment will liberate humanity from those three false gods?” #Serres
It is the last of the three that concerns me here for here Quirinus represents the Media/Jurist Function, which has become the legislator and the organizer of production and consumption. Sometime ago I provisionally sketched the possible (probable) relations between the Media/Jurist system and the Sovereign (Parliament). Comparing it (hopefully) to the exemplary case of the British Sovereign of the time killing the Thomas Mores (both versions) at the precise historical moment when the Jurists-Priests were slowly being divorced from the pole of sovereignty that they had occupied. But this stills seems to be an insufficient and incomplete example to create a comparison for our present situation. Until fairly recently the Media/Jurist function was filled by a Science-Jurist system which made direct and steadfast appeals to truth, evidence and facts. But this is not to forget the third aspect of this system, for it is not a binary system, but a trinary system. The third aspect being war, Mars, which is both the violent toolset of the repressive state apparatus, but also the occasionally heroic war machine of revolt and rebellion. Heroes so they say must always die, their blood feeding the roots of the system.
I think however that the best local historical example which both justifies and also mirrors the present situation is the earlier historical example of the peasants revolt. For here we can see how the war machine of the peasantry revolted against the Priest/Jurist system and the Sovereign(Monarch/aristocracy) system. It was this revolt which with its attacks upon the Priest/Jurists and the Aristocrats and which included the refusal of taxes and the initial sacking of monasteries and which in turn enabled the Sovereign(Monarch) function to attack the Priest/Jurist system and ultimately enabled its replacement by the Science/Jurist system which lasted from Issac Newton until the late 20th Century until its terrible replacement by the #Spectacle … by Media/Jurists.
Here then is the crux of this reading of the Serres quote - does the present crisis threaten the stratum or the weaker of the poles, whether this is the Media/Jurist system or the magician/king and if the former will it cause its replacement by another variant of the media system or something else ?
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really256gp liked this
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hautepop said:
paragraphs plz (if this is not write-only)!
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driftwork posted this
