the purpose or mandate of this ‘newspaper’, whose single quotation marks signify something in the manner of its digitisation, as distinct from purely analogue, or what we might call, perhaps more polemically, ‘capitalist’ means of production, is to—inform. the question, however, is how to inform when market technocratism looms larger, not simply over questions of policy and geopolitics, but also over the form our news takes. this is not to reject an objective ‘informational’ news, but to argue that, in contrasting it with what we presently have, its objectivity originates in the way in which some paradigm, ultimately pathological, imposes or asserts itself on how we are to understand what we read. generally, this is called the angle or slant of a sentence or article, but it extends an objectivity of its own in that, while newspapers may be fraught with bias, the ‘presence’, as it were, of some bias is the mediatable form with which we actually contend when we try ascertain what we read. for instance, a technocratic headline might report that consumers are suffering from bureaucratic backlogs relating to return of wrongly-levied duties on imports, in which case we may surmise that the problem is with how consumers are detained by unfair administrative practices. this is a broader conflict; the news simply ‘reports’ it. the word ‘consumer’ is accepted because we read it used in such a way. there is no news simple behind this objective fabrication. we accept it, however, because it regulates a world-view. this scientific reporting takes place because we all unequivocally, albeit unconsciously, support a market technocratic reading—and create the story in looking for it. this ‘objectivity’, however, is not to be found really even in bias, or its critique as such, but in accepting how the pathology makes the thing what it is; it is not an interruption to how it works. the question is how long we may sustain a form we are otherwise inclined to reject when ‘evidence’ suggests us it must be rejected? what is our ‘objectivity’, if not an objective reading of pathologies? may it not be that we must have such words of our own which we use, insisting as we may upon the relevance of some change in paradigm which necessitates a change in language. as it stands, ideology critique gets as far as recognising the work of a word like consumer in setting up the ‘background’ which generates it. once the news no longer reports, there is no naive ‘consumer’. the question is then to have a pathology of our own. what is objective is not disputed, again, but we must rally with an objectivity which appears in the interruptions to its own narrative, in slips of tongue of what it is ‘otherwise’ trying to say. we cannot promote a new consumer any more than we can wish a new paradigm of production into existence. instead, we must present ‘critically’ what must be read critically; we assess forms as forms, so as not to lead people into thinking that the words we use are somehow more real—their reality is to be found in how they leverage their effect in being merely references to something else, so that how they appear is the material force of their character. a question may be asked such as, what kind of journalists, then, do we have? what kind of informational infrastructure would we maintain? again, our interest into point out objectively what we call the form of the content of the newspaper we read. we say, it is objective because we can, after a certain point, point out its quotations, the points of synthesis which ramify the view it is giving us. we do not just ‘accept’ that what is objective is the world beyond the news to which it blindly refers. this is not relativistic, however. on the contrary, it is the very property of this pathological need to interpret before we see which renders the naive content of our pathologies, the ‘stuff’ as it were which we will sincerely try and combat in reading about at all. there is no manipulative ‘reading’ here which sets itself up merely with the intent to mislead; on what basis would it mislead us when what is objective is the interruptive influence of some pathology which must be itself, as it were, read into. far from rejecting bias, we must take it as the interpretive starting-off point. it is where the clinical terms of our assessment, analysis, and dispute rest. we will not debate whether a ‘consumer’ really exists out there, but the political stakes of such a construction. it is a construction—this is its objectivity, its manifest conceptuality. if we abhor such ‘constructions’ it is to the end that we cannot simply, even if we should wish it, escape them.
let us pass, briefly, to a short illustration of the move from objective fallibility to the more tangential subjective fallibility. in doing so, we will try to illustrate as well our political purpose. when geoffrey elton, noted british historian of stuart and tudor times, single-handedly responsible for the academic restoration of thomas cromwell’s reputation, created his practical revolution in the interpretation of henry viii’s government during the 1530s, he was succeeded by his student david starkey who became the principal interpreter of henry viii himself, until he was himself succeeded, not by an historian, but by lawyer and writer hilary mantel. she chose, in some sense against them, to write a fictionalised account of the times they had long laboured over to study. where they have produced academic accounts, not only rich, but ultimately severely restricted, by the facts, she decided to ‘read between the lines’, as it were. a classic mantel motif is show, for instance, the bloody hands of the woman who attended the body of anne boleyn at her death; they were her maids, members of the nobility themselves who had lived with her in close company. she discusses the weight—the potential weight—of her severed head. is this the ‘stuff’ of history? it is, in the lacanian sense, more real than any realistic account of historical facts. where others are obliged to write only to where the limit of the fact leads them, mantel is able to effect a stunning dialectical move with respect to this otherwise objective shortcoming of historical account and knowledge. she is able to see the ‘hand’ at work in either concealing facts, denying them, purging them (a history of its own), or which serves to radically affirm them, exaggerate them. while this is, of course, the stuff of academic dispute, it is only hilary mantel who really affects the change towards this subjective fallibility, because the shadows at work in rendering obscure history she sees as a plot of its own, the real ‘stuff’ of history, etc. people are at their most active in trying to waylay historical accuracy, pruning it or bending it to their own use, and rather than seeing this as a naive interruption, there where we must now admit of historical speculation, mantel sees the real of historical story-telling. her method is therefore avowedly literary, not because fictionalisation provided her some novel basis on which to explore certain such possible threads of ‘manipulation’, but as the only theatre in which she could present this manipulation itself. any historical account would be forced, even if it reported this ‘manipulation’, to nonetheless give it as if it were another fact, and it would be largely disproved on the same grounds for trying to push a narrative of its own, etc. the point, however, is that there is no simple evidence for this manipulation, because it exists between the lines of the facts themselves—and thereby itself constitutes the only really objective account of what happened. but, to go here is to abandon even the form of historical story-telling. as a note, we may, in the terms of critical political economy, distinguish between what is forced to become speculative, as a means of extending beyond what can we be simply ‘known’, always restricted by having to conceal its bias and insist upon its ‘potential’ verisimilitude, and that which we may call more radically subjectively fallible or more ‘real’ in how it re-presents manipulations or disfigurations as part of the ‘objective’ account. every knows, after all, there is no way one can predict what will happen; none at all. why do we elect then that there is such a term as financial speculation on the basis of which all value is created in our society, for does it not conform to the same pathology? is it not also trying to conceal its ‘bias’, unable to move beyond its own naive limits (except by insisting upon its ‘potential’, which it must reinforce in the terms of present value through renegade capital markets) into the realm wherein there is the radical, but active, misconstrued which ‘makes our reality’. in this very explicit sense, one must remain a pragmatist against the fantasists of speculation. go to the end, by all means, of the ‘facts’, but affect the change in perspective which turns their wriggling limits into the genuine conditions for the objective ‘manipulation’ which is our reality—as opposed to simply ‘continuing’ as if our society is headed somewhere over there, of which the facts are an innocent foretaste. not only does this stymy any real notion of agency, it delimits wrongly the presence of our pathologies which render ‘systems’ of action and inaction, whose effect, far from being objectively construable in the normal manner, can only be ‘understood’ (and, in a sense, known) through the apprehension of their ‘manipulations’ as what is, in the end, radically objectively present. indeed, as a final note on manel’s method, it is worth mentioning how she was once criticised in a review for focussing too much on the drapery, on the linens, on the characters’ clothes. ignoring its misogynistic undertones, this review misses the precise role of such insignificant material plays in being just that literariness which renders out the possible, absolue ‘feeling’ and effect of a manipulated reality. in the literary theatre, one does not have ‘facts’, or even simply competing realities, so much as some broader manipulation which is only renderable through the ‘bloody hands’, or the weight of the severed head, or, indeed, the drapery. one builds up the subtle clues of a character’s inner world and interpretation so as to give the feeling of how it is that they ‘remain’ in the shadows, not as an effect of historical shortsightedness, but as part of the real program of history itself. it is the challenge of the writer to use literary method to ramify this shadowiness, which expresses itself through insignificant details, strange turns of phrase or speech, looks; not to ‘invest’ them with, say, libidinal charge, as such, or exclusively, but to give them some real dimension—like they are really happening as we read them. this real feeling does not come from there being some ‘reality’ which we can imagine putting ourselves in, but from the radical shift in perspective which comes from how we may encounter the shadows as the form of what is going on, as manipulated reality. it is therefore also no surprise that sexuality is everywhere in her stories, but with a very freudian and dialectical insight, that the sexual is precisely what departs from the simply erotic into whatever it is not. the ‘mystery’ of female sexuality, for instance, of how to secure an heir, far from proposing that behind governance there is a merely sexual impulse rather instructs on just how government itself exists to speculate desperately on such matters. it is not there to normalise sexuality by overcoming it with references to the administrative or sovereign advantage of this or that marriage, but that it is there precisely because the most radical administrative advantage is to be found in addressing the question and mystery of human sexuality, which will not simply give itself in the form of some adaptable metaphor or simply reduce itself to erotic attraction or outburst. even in sex, then, there is this question of what is objectively erotic or of finding the lust of the character, but rather that when you come upon desire, rather like with historical fact, which may be presented to you in exaggerated terms or underplayed terms or have been forcefully written out, one has there the objective manipulation which obscures the naive unit of some personality or striving which finally let us pin down a character’s motivations; we have, then, only there ‘desire’ with which to then try to construct a personality. it is that search which relates us to them, because we are able to see the form now of their objective presentations in the proper manner and method of that which principally, primarily, and most pathologically upsets their otherwise simple presentation. it is this which is a political method, in that we must find the political equivalent vis-a-vis market technocratism of what hilary mantel found through literature with respect to history. we must try to promote, firstly, the manipulation as objective, as the shadowiness we cannot simply dispel to get at what is going on—because it is what is going. we must abandon, even, the naive substance of some kind of leftist ‘revolution’, which is only ever used these days to avoid the very question of how our methods are a study in manipulation, not in political utopia. we must face, perhaps foremost, the paradoxes which emerged when it was last attempted to overcome the class negotiator that is the state, so as to face squarely the question of what other manipulation we can imagine conceding to instead. such things as markets and states will remain so long as we continue to try to treat them as objective phenomena which can be overcome objectively, or legitimately. they are pathologies and manipulations, whose form bears out clinical political disorders. what we can only ever succeed at doing in overcoming one form, one manipulation, with another; and if there are those who would question us as some kind of manipulator, we would ask them who they think they are, that they have overcome the zero-level of human pathology. on the contrary, we have no choice but to make a political science of the objectivity of manipulation and pathology, if only to critique the naive horizon of any political scientificity. whatever remains is the only real subject of our method. if we succeed at an objective account, it is because we succeed at exposing these very pathologies and manipulations without compromise or melancholy. mourn the world that never was and you may live to see another one appear.