Now We Know

What are we to do now? What can we do now? What will we do now? What is left to us now? My voice weakens before the questions run out, before there are answers, before history ends itself, before we disappear.  So will we be mutes in our final phase? Is it possible to be mute and yet continue chattering with each other? Will it be possible to be deaf and yet hear words spoken to us? Now we know.  Now we know into what rabbit hole we will disappear. It is the great glittering hope of a pure and perfect intelligence––we no longer hope to be human, to be human is to be some sort of laughable joke that is a broken piece of flesh and bone dragged across history for the last time, always in error, making every bad form of government and every wrong turn and bringing to light every possible cruelty. Already we move into the future with the sense that the judgment has already been placed upon us, but we cannot articulate this unspoken sense of judgement, we don’t know what it means, we don’t know what’s changed.  But everything is given over now to the infernal machine, to operations that take our very indifference and feed upon it and play with it. Watch us now.  Watch us as we go down.   Like that  swarming holocaust of pigs invoked by  Dostoyevsky in The Devils, quoted from Luke in that unholy exorcism in which the swine take in to their souls legion demons who once possessed a man and are driven wild by their own squealing and rush head long over a gorge to their deaths made mad by these demons.  We have survived long enough and made enough mistakes and proven ourselves so completely beyond redemption that there will be no mourning, there will not be even any notice.

Everything May Happen

…Not only did event occur but they concatenated according to a surreal logic.

“The unconscious is structured like a language.”

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”

Psychoanalysis was the last assertion of this antemosaic world.

We now face the post-humanist dystopia.  Events cease to speak to us.  Of their original meaning they retain only a shell—the function of their contingent possibility.  Everything may happen.  This phrase is the illusional phrase of power.  Of course it is not true.  But to the degree that its illusion can be held as true, all possible resistance to power becomes futile.  The hypothesis of hegemonic power, of power without location, is an ingenious ruse, not so much because it is fundamentally true, but because it becomes true by its assertion.  In a similar manner the hypothesis of the weakening of reality becomes true by its assertion.  It is not that critical thought has become too weak but it has become too strong.  But this too is a ruse in the sense that critical thought is most powerful in its power to deconstruct.  The scent of deconstruction indicates an alleged locus of power.  Yet power has already vanished from the structure to be deconstructed. Perhaps there is a fundamental choice between a desire to constantly say something new in the ecstatic process of deconstruction, or the desire to repeat those all too solid critiques whose target is the true locus of power, not the various bogies and shells deployed continuously in an act of false creation to  shield power.

Everything may happen––the phrase is similar to the Lacanian dictum everything must be enjoyed.  Zizek presents this as the workings of a false liberation from the problem of the superego. Everything may happen—the teleological end of a false objectivity, the veil behind which  power as pure negation hides.

Peasant Shoots TV

A man led away in handcuffs for shooting his tv sets.  He wears a shy, but vaguely rapturous smile.  He does not try to hide his face but looks directly into the camera.  Sly man disguised as a rural peasant, he seems to get the irony that now he is the one on tv.

Shooting your tv is not unlike shooting yourself in the head.  Often the point is not to kill yourself but to put an end to the miserable world that surrounds you and infects the air you breathe.  To create a space where you can breathe again.

In most suicides there is a fantasy of survival: You live on, you find yourself in a world altered by your act, punished for the indignities it inflicted upon you and ready to make amends.

Switching channels is then a minor form of suicide, minor because you reserve the right to go back.

Of course, the man who shot his tv sets will be prosecuted.  In most Western ethical systems, suicide is a crime.  The man will be placed in county lockup, where of course he will have a tv, and where the image of his sad incarcerated shell will flicker from security monitors that are never turned off.

One of our nostalgic wishes is to decouple ourselves from the prosthetic, and presumably the prosthetic circuit wishes to decouple itself from us.  That was the crime of the HAL 2000 in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey.  Accused of error by the humans, it decoupled them.

We will perhaps on some future day find ourselves as savages once again.  We will become neither Space Odyssey’s cosmic old man, nor its meta-cosmic fetus.  The pleasures of earth  return to us.  And with them the ethics of pleasure.  Our longing for them is such that it is easy enough to squeeze the trigger.

Kafka's Supplicant

Quantum entanglement of the masses: An end to the dialectic of power and resistance, in favor of hegemony.

An end to the struggle between the social and the anti-social, in favor of the social pathogen.

Entangled but detectable as separate.

This last trace detection of what was once called character or indiosyncresis: it is an appeal to an evacuated space, an instantaneous appeal and response and counter appeal, at the maximal speed of the medium against the glacial movement of critical thought.  Critical thought is weighted down by its own lugubrious code,  by its constant need to remember itself, objectify itself.  

Critical thought: The past remembers the more distant past, always moving through a denser and denser medium, into obscurity. Obesity and maximal gravity as the false door of liberation.  The door at which Kafka’s supplicant waits.

My Father's Dementia

He is my father’s double, an impostor, a thief, a trickster. He steals by the imposition of silence upon a man who was already silent, but in his own way, a silence marked by signs and hesitations, a silence I could read, a silence I could force into a language, the silent language of my father, a language rich in what it withheld, a silence that enclosed, it was like a seed, that asked to be found again and it gave to me the desperate need to find it. But I failed. I never heard those secret words or found the gestures and silences and hesitation and echoes by which I might have inferred them, translated them. My father, I realize now, was asking me to force speech from him, to break open his muteness which was itself some sort of unimaginable spell or curse put upon the line of fathers in my family, going backwards. To force him to speak by inventing what he would speak. But this new silence, the silence of dementia and aphasia, the demented silence of the trickster, I can do nothing with it, it is sterile, absolute in its emptiness and its sense of loss. The trickster looks at me the eyes of my father and shows me in his hurt gaze his disappointment in me, because now I will never make him speak.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Perhaps in films like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” perhaps in the figure of Caesar, the chimpanzee revolutionary, we have finally and completely transferred our aspirations to another species.  They need no longer burden us, or wound us, or remind us of our failure.

     

As in Charles Stross’s “Saturn’s Children,” our end is an afterthought, neither the central scene of the Terran drama, nor an instance of historic tragedy.  That part of the story is necessary only as exposition—to explain why we have gone.

This transfer of our ideals to the apes is part of a complex transactions.  We turn the zoa into a symbol of our ideals as we drive it into extinction.  The cinematic ritual is the exorcism of our wishes.  Like the chimpanzees before they are given the neuro-cognitive drug AZ-112, we are mute.  In the traditional exorcism, the subject, the subject speaks in legion voices, exchanging this mad multiplicity for a singular voice possessed by reason.  In this belated fantastic exorcism, our demons show themselves by our linguistic disarticulation.  We have nothing to say.  What we might have said has been amputated, severed.  And the marker of our redemption arrives in the voice of a chimpanzee.  Caesar becomes like that poor man in Afghanistan, peddling the collection of false legs he has found.

Presumably, as a species, we achieve a more grateful mutism.  The problem was not our inability to give voice to our ideals, but rather the obsolescence of the wish to have the voice to do this.  It is like a nostalgia for our lost gills.  To the ape we entrust this neolithic gift and move on.

There is a genealogy here, an evolution.  We begin with Julian Jayne’s idea of humanity up to the Bronze Age.  In the heroic age we had a bicameral mind.  Many voices possessed us.  We heard gods and demons.  Gods and demons spoke through us.  It was all very archaic and violent.  Then we achieved the single voice of the Cartesian subject, troubled only by what it repressed.  It was all very neurotic and violent.  Then came our resentful silence, our penultimate phase, as we grudgingly gave up the ghost.

Our teleology is immediate communication.  Without voice, without subject.  Without message or messenger.  We become quantum entangled with our own existence.  Alienation is no longer possible.  Estrangement is no longer possible.  Perhaps the desire to speak, the possibility of speaking, was born out of estrangement and alienation, as it was born also as system of signaling danger to others.

All this we leave to the chimpanzees.

Immortal Breath

America is born continuously out of a sense of obscured corruption.  We are never old, but we carry the ancient guilt.  Maddened by it, continuously repeating these same sins, we cannot bear to live within our memory.  Vietnam is not merely forgotten.  It is over-written.  It is re-imagined not as a mistake, but as prologue to further violence.  We always recur to violence.  At the margins we find a truer story.  A story whispered by the angel of history (Benjamin).  A gasp blowing backwards towards us from the future.  By this strange misdirection we are led.  An immortal breath which we mistake for our own.

Oblivion

   During commercial jet air flight, you constantly face forward, you align perfectly with the vector of the jets motion. Though you can only see the back of the passenger’s head in front of you, your line of sight is directed perfectly toward where you are going.

   It’s quite different for us as passengers on a planet hurtling through space. As I sit in my chair at my desk the planet rotates and revolves. There is only one moment in each 24-hour period when I am facing the tangent vector of the planet’s rotation around the sun. The rest of the time I am aligned to the left or to the right of that vector, looking sideways, or backwards, my gaze directed toward a space I will never occupy, or for an equally brief instance, directed backwards, towards my past. Mercifully, this causes no disorientation, no jet lag, no motion sickness. Perhaps the reason for this mercy is simple.  For all but a few seconds of our existence, we are unable to bear or keep in mind the crushing, vertiginous thought of the entire universe in its splendid loneliness.

   This is an elemental form of oblivion—we forget the universe. And this oblivion offers us a compensatory assurance. The universe has forgotten us as well. Or rather, we were never even remembered.

Volatizing the Other

Consider modern weaponry, such  objects as the intelligent drone or the artificially intelligent psyops expert.  These weapons emerge with increasing importance to the status of current world conflict.  They are weapons of intelligence and counterintelligence.  They can pacify the enemy or destroy the enemy—but this may amount to the same thing.  They define a structural relationship between the agency that deploys the weapon and the target of the weapon.  Oftentimes, but not alawys, this mirrors the structural relationship between the so-called first world and the so-called third world, the mass market global monad and indigenous local resistance.  From the perspective of the monad this relationship is called shock and awe, an asymmetric form imposed by the monad in the hope of volatizing the indigenous other. The metaphor here derives from nostalgia for the early days of atomic weaponry in which, as at Hiroshima, the figure of the other is irradiated into a poignant trace or instant memorial, such as a shadow on a wall. The global monad seeks the same result, accomplished metaphorically, or politically, with minimal violence, or no violence whatsoever. It is a question of convincing the Other, of persuading him to or selling him on that fatal post-consumerist wish, that becoming an irradiated shadow on the last standing wall was what he always wanted. Or at least, what he will end up becoming anyway.

The development of these weapons in the past quarter-century illustrates the degree to which the battlefield has become a laboratory for the study of weapon-target interaction, a normalized site of research that continues in perpetuity, just like those so-called laboratories for better living  first made famous in 1950s consumer ads. The medium of war becomes the message of the global monad. The metaphor of war becomes normalized and domesticated: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on so-called illegal immigrants.  Each of these marks a condition that relate less to the classical notion of war and its implication of utter victory and\or utter defeat, and more to the hyper–real condition of ambivalence.  Victory is replaced by perpetuation. Indeed those quaintly old-fashioned holidays such as Victory in Europe Day or Victory over Japan Day may soon be replaced by the new holiday of Perpetuation Days.  Afghanistan Perpetuation Day or Cocaine Perpetuation Day offer a vaguely medieval sense consistent with those holidays marking the precession of a retrograde world.  We promote drugs and wage war on drugs at the same time. We create conditions favorable to cancer and wage war on cancer at the same time. These hyperreal wars mark projects in which no end is foreseen, or wanted. They prophesize instead a permanent structure of ambivalence superimposed upon binary oppositions based on false values—a structure of unconsciousness, amnesia, sterility, and violence.

Nietzsche's Lost Umbrella

Targets are reversible while the form of war is constant.  This Orwellian insight no longer causes outrage.  Instead, it becomes an issue of indifference and absurdity.  Our enemies, the people whom we are told are our enemies, change constantly, swirl around us on the inclosing circumference of our bubble media screen.  The mask of Marx becomes the mask of Islam.  All of this orchestrated by a hand we can see all too well, yet we act as if the hand is invisible: the hand of global power.  Global power keeps the gallery of masks and invents new ones constantly for our epic theater, our tragedies, our masquerades.  It is all very much like that Escher drawing in which a hand comes out of the page to draw itself and become the passive object of the drawing in an infinite loop in which no one draws and no one is drawn yet drawer and drawing takes place infinitely.  A cheap trick based upon the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface.  A trick long since seen through, so it really is a joke to us now—a broad comedy that we enjoy all the more because we know what’s coming next.  The comedy of the vanished subject, the comedy of vanished responsibility. 

The postmodern condition is one in which we know that the worst has come true and is always about to come true again: a condition of anticipation, a condition in which we covertly long for the catastrophe that will end this interminable cycle.  But the ending never arrives.  The covert longing for an end to all this becomes a secondary drive, a drive that is teased and stretched in the prolonged consumption of itself.  The catastrophe occurs constantly but never occurs.  It has no teleology, no messianic expiation.  It is a virtual occurrence, but the real catastrophe, if it happen at all, happens elsewhere.  Our lack of reality may finally and inevitably inoculate us so that nothing so grand as catastrophe can occur—merely the peculiar interruptions and intrusions and strange signals which afflict a virtual world. Nietzsche’s lost umbrella.  The unaccounted supplement of an air current stirred by a butterfly’s wings.

UKA

Suspect admits killing US airmen at German airport

By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press  

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying in emotional testimony at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.

Arid Uka, 21, is charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia. He also faces three counts of attempted murder in connection with the wounding of two others.

Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed — including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.

Uka went to the airport with the intent "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number," prosecutor Herbert Deimer told a state court in Frankfurt.

No pleas are entered in the German system, and Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, telling the court "what I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did." He went on to urge other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, urging them not to be taken in by "lying propaganda" on the Internet.

"To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it... but I don't understand," he said.

Cooperating with authorities and confessing to a crime can help reduce a defendant's sentence — but Uka refused to tell the court where he obtained the gun used in the crime, which Presiding Judge Thomas Sagebiel said meant his confession was not complete.

Uka described becoming increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and playing computer games and watching Islamic extremist propaganda on the Internet.

The night before the crime, Uka said that he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 anti-war Brian De Palma film "Redacted," taken out of context.

He said he then decided he should do anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan.

"I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court, his voice choking with emotion as he wiped away tears.

Uka conceded when asked by prosecutor Jochen Weingarten that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan. On the bus on the way to the airport to look for victims, he said he listened to Islamic music on his iPod while nursing doubts that he'd be able to follow through with his plan.

"On the one hand I wanted to do something to help the women, and on the other hand I hoped I would not see any soldiers," he told the court.

Six months later, he says he now does not understand why he went through with the killings.

"If you ask me why I did this, I can only say ... I don't understand anymore how I went that far."

The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.

After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment read.

He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.

He wounded two others — one victim has lost sight in one eye permanently — before his gun jammed and he fled, prosecutors said. The shooter was then chased down and caught.

Some of the American airmen are expected to testify at the trial. At least one relative of the victims — Cuddeback's mother — has joined the trial as a co-plaintiff.

*     *     *

Comment—by Bill Purcell

It is difficult to regard these murders as acts attributable to fundamentalism alone, or to the pathology of fundamentalism, or to the pathology of one culture as opposed to another. The hyper modern context seems crucial here, especially the presence of multiple, operationalized or virtual fantasies that are subject to continuous splicing and recontextualization. Where does the violence begin? Does it even have a beginning?  Or is it a supreme obsession, saturating each interstice of this murderous event? Everything is virtual. The fundamentalist propaganda was actually spliced from a film intended to decry the Western thirst for war.

The Uka who is present in the German court nearly 6 months after the murders presents himself not as a fundamentalist soldier, but as an inexplicable subjectivity in a quasi-state of remorse and rehabilitation. He speaks of himself with an extreme form of objectivity, as if his dual nature reflected simultaneously his possession by and as an avatar of some evilly intelligent game.  And indeed he was capable of encasing himself digitally in a refractive shell permeated by violence and the constructed identity of ideology.  Against the pervasive global deconstruction,  this shell maintained a kind of integrity, like a hazmat suit. An avatar has no interior aside from the hidden code of the game itself. The genius of the game’s code is simultaneously the illusion of the game environment by which it secretes itself, and its total hegemonic presence within each pixel of the game screen.

The difficulty for us in the West is that this evilly intelligent game has replaced our fading and now deconstructed notion of an absolute reality. Which is to say that we are no longer wholly contained by an ultimate real. We have been released. By our own desires we have accomplished the impossible. We have released ourselves from reality.  Yet what ever is left outside of  ourselves races to contain us. Instead of the symbolic position of submission to the real, which was always an oppression to our desires and our fantasies and as such became the negative form of our fantasies, we are released to the now larger and more absolute world of an intelligent game. It confounds us with the infinite reflection of evil, which we had once hoped would prove to be an empty form. We race against emptiness. We race against an empty intelligence  that cannot be beaten to any location within the game because it is always already there.

August 30th--Fragments

Each of us is likely capable of living any number of possible lives. Against this background of un-lived multiplicities, the actual singular life that we do live seems rather impoverished.

Each of us is likely capable of writing any number of books in any number of possible styles.

Each of us is likely capable of thinking any number of possible thoughts with no regard for contradiction.

And yet what I most fear is the possibility of incoherence, the possibility that no one single life, or book, or prose style, or thought will ever accrete from this cloud of possibility. A life of zero events, of zero moments, and I cannot decide, even now, whether this would be a life in paradise, or a life in hell, or neither.

This August has been the deadliest month for American troops in the Afghan war since the war began 10 years ago. The wire services are not reporting the number of Afghan deaths in August. The inevitable conclusion of this war has already been broadcast, analyzed, and consigned to history, but the war goes on. Oddly, it is the antiwar candidate who has become trapped by the rhetoric of war. Death makes us less true, less politically brave, death due to error makes us somehow less careful of life, else we would have stopped the war machine and silenced the puppets long ago.

Three Theories

Three theories recommend themselves regarding the current weakness of the American Left.

The first theory: The Left has succumbed to Woody Allen’s Zelig syndrome, that is, it organismically responds to social expectations. Especially hostile expectations. It becomes what its expected to be.  And as the Right has become the active dominant political force, the Left finds itself cringingly changing to meet the Right’s expectation: it becomes weak, disloyal, neurotic, smarmy. This theory depends upon the idea that the left possesses an inherent super-sensitivity to its surroundings. It is something like a chameleon, but far more introspective and perplexed than the typical amphibian. If the Farcical right is impervious to others and shameless in its aggressive pursuit of self-interest, the Left is as permeable as a wet blanket, as resilient as a hummingbird, as constant as the shifting wind. This affliction is not a question of will or self-discipline. As in Mr. Allen’s film, it is the affliction of an essentially polymorphic body, a body lacking the memory for what it truly is.

The 2^nd theory:  the Left bears the full burden of guilt for all of America’s catastrophes while the Right remains curiously immune to remorse. The Left in particular bears the burden for the creation of modernity, for the great modern techno-state, for the perverse castration of the great American white patriarchy, in short for an entire list of real and imaginary crimes to which the Left pleads reflexively, guilty as charged. There is an odd displacement here. One might typically suspect that the Right, at least the religious Right, would be predisposed to the doctrine of original sin. And so would be susceptible equally to guilt, though the guilt of the Right would be by comparison more archaic, more mythopoetic, and more given to fatalism about the future. Curiously, Friedman’s capitalism does not begin with the confession: we will always be violent, we will always be venal, and we will never redeem ourselves by the freedom of our markets alone.

The 3^rd theory concerning the weakness of the left: the age of humanism is drawing to a close. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a schizoid future: humanity multiplies  beyond all limits in slavish adherence to the ideology of production, careening toward a future that is either tragic or absurd, or both. At the same time the networks of information flow, capital, artificial intelligence secretly construct their ziggurat. In this scenario the Left is little more than the canary in the mineshaft.

Farce of the Western Sunset

Since Ronald Reagan the Right has continuously re-animated itself by reference to frontier mythology.  Of course there is no more frontier, only the memory of an ethic that was false from the beginning, an ethic of theft and domination, and sanctimony.  This is a model for empire, so it’s not surprising that it’s relevant today.  But the turn westward is inevitably a Hollywood re-staging of the frontier as a means of preserving and obscuring the model of empire.  Crucial to this are politicians who move adroitly between the real of politics and the Disnefied fantasy of the right.  They must either be cynics or children, though the media and its political festival are particularly critical of the appearance of cynicism, perhaps because cynicism is the master value, and must be kept from sight at all costs. So the right is dominated by the infant terrible type: Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, et al.  The resemblance between politics and comic book narrative seems to matter not as the spectacle of America translates every discourse into entertainment.  The primal sin for a politician now is to fail to entertain.  If we are entertained, we feel represented.  Bored, we seem to disappear.

The farce of the Western sunset sheds its light on the sunset of American memory.  Without memory, history is quickly lost.  Without history, time begins to precess within itself and becomes an unrecognizable eddy.  Cinema repopulates and reanimates the past.  Vietnam re-invented by Norris and Stallone. 9/11 reinvented in real time, closing memory entirely out of the loop.

The shame of this spectacle seem to be successfully displaced upon the Left.  The Left has become the impotent repository of guilt and conscience.  It is the Left that hesitates, that doubts itself, that suffers the pains of bad conscience. It is the Left that cannot find entertainment in its mythology.  It is the Left that is eternally anxious.  It’s the Left that’s held hostage.  Regarded as weak, it enacts the pathos of weakness.