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.