Paint a Devil and Laugh

We find ourselves caught once again in a presidential election that is a game of unmasking.  A kind of  masquerade in which all candidates are too obviously costumed: adorned personages who hide the mundane or even hideous faces of a true politics beneath their finery.  The game becomes unmasking them by midnight—secret scandals brought to light, secret words that betray their true cynicism, moments of weakness, moments of hypocrisy.

This is the side show of shame—the electoral process of a nation filled with contempt for its government,  weary of its militaristic adventures, and shaken by the irreversible tick of history— a history that was once thought to have ended but has eerily continued on a posthumous basis.

Only the comedy of carnival redeems it, the feast of the flesh, the deep hollow laughter of our souls.  We need this release, this public catharsis, this unmasking of fools.  Secretly we understand that the democratic will exists now only as farce.  It is best forgotten, left on the other side of history. Our deepest demand now is for the comedy denied in the twilight of our techno-feudalism

Mitt Romney was sure to be unmasked.  He is nothing but masks and the only game with him is to get to the final mask and there find the ‘no face’ that is supporting the entire apparatus.  

But that ‘no face’ is not merely his lack of authenticity.  It is the face of empire and techno-feudalism.  We had best paint a devil over it, and laugh.

THE NEW TITANIC

Australia’s Clive Palmer is planning to build and commercially sail an exact duplicate of the Titanic.  This endeavor is obviously an extension of cinematic imagination, which is to say it is second order protheses of imagination—that weakened faculty which depends more and more on technical artifice to remain alive.

Technology began according to the dictates of imagination.  Its function was to operationalize a wish.  But now the actual process of operationalizing eclipses the wish.  Perhaps the catalog of wishes is exhausted, and now we confront an age in which anything that can be operationalized will be operationalized.

But perhaps in the case of the duplicate Titanic the wish has survived in an unspoken and proscribed form.  Perhaps the secret wish, the object petit a, is to go down with the ship once again, to drown the virtual order (which is from its beginning haunted by death and absence anyway), and then to finally encounter the real by drowning and finding oneself buried in North Atlantic debris field.

One interpretation of our current age is that it evidences the symptom of traumatic repetition—the obsessive, continuing, too near visitation of the Lacanian real, the dead spot, the unspeakable rupture, in our symbolic order.  At the same time that we seek to replace the symbolic order with the virtual order, which would allow no traumatic eruption of the real just as the Titanic would not sink, a shadow returns to us.  Would not the helmsman of the new Titanic be tempted when an iceberg appears?

AUTO-DA-FE

The public coma is itself a mysterious phenomenon.  The induction of a peculiar alienation from self interest—in America and in Europe the middle class was induced to vote against its own interests to essentially impoverish itself in a kind of auto-da-fe of moral rectitude. We must suffer.  We have been self indulgent.  We have been liberal and we have lost our values.  We are no longer self-reliant, thrifty.  We care too much for pleasure.

Grotesque figures danced before the electorate as if a comic book version of neoliberal ideology had come to life—Joe the Plumber, Sarkozy, Cameron, Palin.  Like a medieval carnival visible by the light of the burning middle class.

But perhaps the carnival of austerity is coming to an end and we are entering an even more dire  field of conflict.  Symptomatic of this new era is the decline of the influence of terror, both as an issue of foreign affairs and as a domestic goad—the terror of the falling economy.

Internationally the war on terror proceeds and there is no reason to believe that it will ever end.  But it is perhaps in a lull and certainly the public, to the degree that it evidences interest, demonstrates a kind of terror fatigue.  The war on terror has become less visible, more autonomic (especially in the weaponry of drones) and now has become an unsettlingly perverse background situation.  America never bothered to understand why its empire arouses such animosity, and so in a sense has secured its destiny in episodic stupidity—the fate of all empires.

And the domestic terror of a cyclic economy seems to have lost influence as well.  Hence the Greek and French ‘no’ to austerity, and to the techno-economics of neoliberalism.  The electorate is perhaps suffering from austerity fatigue and hypocrisy fatigue.  But the forever played and unplayed card, the apparently inexhaustible card, is fear of the other, and in jingoistic America where zombie films and post-apocalyptic fantasies play in our summer multiplexes, we will always prefer to make our political movements unconsciously so as not to disturb our dreams.

GLOBAL NECROMANCY PART 2

Sarkozy is no more, so Merkel now becomes the face of this joyless realism, of this reality which is perhaps all too real in the sense that the pose of ideological realism, the neoliberal pose a la Fukuyama that its ideology is the ultimate vision of what is real, the end of the debate about what is real and in that sense the end of history, leads only to a terrifying oppression.  This is an oppression without alternative, as Merkel would have it.  Except that now, as the electorate awakens, an alternative appears, and the possibility of something like socialism or economic justice opposes the fetishistic cruelty of Merkel’s real. She is the perfect figure for her role—the blunt, unadorned style of a chemist, as if oppression by the corporate elite was a modern science rather than a medieval scheme of alchemy.  And the electorate has only to challenge this oppression to draw out its archaic jingoism (“Germany will not pay for French socialism”)  and its reversion to terroristic prophecy.

GLOBAL NECROMANCY PART 1

Recent elections in Greece and France seem to indicate that the chickens have come home to roost, that the austerity measures so patently designed to keep the global casino afloat are no longer an easy sale to the populace who suffers from their effects.  The electorates have said ‘no’ to Sarkozy and to the stunning duplicity of flaunting a celebrity lifestyle while enforcing a policy of devalued labor and authoritarian oppression.  And the Greeks have said ’no’ to a series of enforced austerity measures that have brought them to their knees and offers them the bleakest of futures—wages that can buy nothing more than subsistence and the impossibility of release from fealty to the banking houses.  ‘No’ to the false realism of neoliberal economics.  ’No’ to the attempt to resurrect a newly punitive and righteous Big Other—the symbolic reign of hyper-capital, low wages, and the anhedonia of perpetual production, perpetual efficiency, and perpetual terror. 

Superficially at least, this chorus of no’s seems to give cause to rejoice.  It seems the electorate has finally and painfully come to its senses, has finally awakened from a long and deep somnambulance as if from a spell cast by Illuminati-type necromancers at work in the vaults of the World Bank.

This somnambulant, coma-like spell cast on the electorate is itself an enigmatic phenomenon and subject to varied and contradictory interpretation.  Merkel and Sarkozy would insist that it is nothing more than the spell of economic reality and to say ‘no’ to this is merely to return to the hallucinatory past of socialism—it is an hallucination to believe there is enough for everyone, it is an hallucination to believe that there is a public and a public interest that trumps the rights of free capital.

ECHO

There is a strange elision within the curse that Juno utters upon Echo, a gap between the terms of the curse as Juno utters them and the actual effect on Echo’s speech.  It is from within this gap that Echo’s famous mimesis emerges, and since Juno most definitely does not condemn the nymph to mimesis but merely to the far less ingenious ‘briefest use of speech’, it is perhaps reasonable to assert that the mimetic echo is somehow the nymph’s stroke of genius, an invention from within the term of oppression—a song from the prison of failing language, a mockery of mortality.  Listening to an echo we hear our own words die, they answer themselves by saying nothing new and then they die.  When we first hear an echo it pleases us.  There is a childlike pleasure in hearing this confirmation of our sound, not unlike seeing the vapors of your breath on a cold day.  We are apparently locked for the term of our existence in the impossible agon of proving that our existence is real, that it is of the same substance and nature of the world’s scattered objects who paradoxically prove their reality by being not us.

Rare Memories of Life

We have the homeless, we have illegal aliens, we have maps that mark the homes of sex offenders, we have electronic bracelets and brick and mortar prisons crowded beyond their capacity. We have the mirror empire of the screen, like Borges sullen and defeated empire of the mirror, but we are already at the  threshold of Borges’ prophecy of reversal––the screen dominates and subjugates us, we have become the imitations, the avatars. And our last obsession is to eradicate or confine all reflections and shadows and doubles of ourselves. And yet even this cruelty succumbs to our sloppiness, distraction, and indifference. We have frightened our shadows, braceleted our reflections, but they remain, derelict and beyond us, provocateurs, ghosts—the dead rarely remember that they have died.

Sparta and Our Hysteric Politicians

Lycurgus seems to anticipate the entire problem of the spectacle–imaginary when he bans statues and imposing architecture from politics. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus believed that edifices and statues “were in no way conducive to sound deliberations, but instead harmful.  They make those who assemble idiotic and give them silly, mindless notions, when at their meetings they can stare at statues and pictures, or the stages of theaters, or the richly decorated roofs of council chambers."

The political class is always most susceptible to confusing spectacle with reality. Perhaps becoming a politician demands the exchange of one for the other. Journalists are next in line in confusing spectacle with reality. Perhaps this demonstrates that politicians and journalists are always, despite their protests, secret members of the same class.

Confusing spectacle with reality is a subtype of hysteria. Contrary to what Freud asserted hysteria is not the exclusive domain of women. Men are often the most spectacular symptom carrier. 

Nor is hysteria fundamentally an erotic symptom. It is much more an ontological or existential symptom. The hysteric suffers from a traumatic vision of the pure emptiness of the world.  The hysterics suffers from the symptom of realizing all too acutely that the world wounds, that the body is easily wounded and never safe. 

Hysteria is narcissism’s echo.  We have John Boehner’s easily flowing tears, Bill Clinton’s lip trembling confessions, and Mitt Romney’s manic insincerity, to demonstrate the hysteria of the political class. 

Imagine what a strange and twisted accomplishment it is, to convince oneself to believe in nothing, so that one can seem to believe.

Bringing Back Roswell

We witness a peculiar zealotry in the candidacy of Rick Santorum.  By ‘zealotry’,  I refer to the medieval dogmatism, the radical certitude, that seems to lie behind his assertions.  To be sure, they are archaic assertions—so pristinely archaic they suggest a technology of re-animation, an operation in which frozen Ice Age dogma is dug out of the tundra of extinct beliefs, its DNA extracted and re-animated, in much the same way that Japanese scientists hope to soon reanimate the extinct woolly mammoth.  

Certitude, at least in theory, and certainly within the operations of history, has passed into an extinction.  No event can be regarded as certain anymore.  The event is lost to us, or provoked to its illusory presence, by the very act of observing it.  And the semi-solid illusion of the event is haunted by the infinite question of what happens to the event when there is no observer.  Without an observer, according to quantum theory, the event recedes into a cloud of probability, this cloud being a space of non-events, a probabilistic continuum of unrealized possibility.

The event of war: “The gulf war did not take place.” (Baudrillard)

The event of the self:  The author of the text is no more.  The subject is no more.

The event of the deity:  God once lived.  But now he is dead.

The irony of fossilized certitude is itself an old story.  To our surprise the enigma of our existence did not depend on certitude, any more than it depended on reality, a twin concept that is now also departed.  Our existence is even lighter, and less consequential, if that is possible, than it was before the banishment of certainty and solidity, yet we continue to exist, as if subjects in an experimental condition of near weightlessness.

Indeed, we might regard the entire apparatus of global modernity as a diabolical anti-gravity machine.  Our work is weightless, our wealth is weightless.  Only our bodies retain a semblance of residual weight in their functions of mortality—and already we dream of divesting ourselves of them, to enter, or inflict upon ourselves, an even more radical experimental condition.  A machine-based incorporeal intelligence configured from a network of uploaded souls.

The Persian mystic Rumi often prayed to be relieved of his individual consciousness, which he regarded as wayward and tormenting and of minuscule importance.  Perhaps global weightlessness can be regarded as the achievement of this dream, as if to make all of us a type of whirling dervish, spinning electromagnetically like little motors as the global network inflicts its charge.

But modernity holds this paradox—while it demands the disappearance of history and meaning, it simultaneously enacts a project to resuscitate everything that is lost: wooly mammoths, ancient pollen and bacteria, the alien creature murdered and dissected at Roswell, even ghosts of the dead are pursued with pseudoscientific instruments in the hope of verifying their presence and speaking with them of their secrets.

The mark of any cultural superego function is its schizoid nature: Everything must disappear!  Everything must be recovered!  The mark of the superego is the impossibility of its demands.

Snow Blind

We are witnessing a peculiar zealotry in the candidacy of Rick Santorum–a drawing of the line between the elect of his vision and those who are radically different from his elect. This zealotry has little to do with democratic discourse but resembles more an attempt at mystic incantation: to bring forth a vision and impose this vision on an erroneous world.

This zealotry is, of course, a reactionary impulse. But it is also highly symptomatic of the modern age of spectacle.

Haunted by our lack of definition and belief, made hollow by our senescent rejection of history while inured to graphic immediacy, we are lost entirely to the appeal of spectacle and vision. Perhaps this serves as a defense against the overwhelming and incessant stream of information––information that is no longer true or false but  is itself a form of virtual spectacle, the cerebral spectacle of failing human thought. Perhaps this is how we mark the distance between ourselves and the gathering inhuman force of artificial networks. We retreat to the hallucinatory desert of reactionary politics, to a blasted landscape that signals a divine judgment upon the world. We are perhaps nostalgic for damnation––for seeing others damned as a confirmation that we are something more than virtual selves.

What is left to us after modernity?––a pallid humanism which itself needs confirmation by pious spectacle. The spectacle of the left versus the spectacle of the right. Both sides of the spectrum suffer from the same loss of reality and the same loss of memory. It is only the perpetual collapse of the left that keeps these two sides from splitting apart entirely. The left's spectacle has poorer ratings these days.  The left suffers from a kind of snow blindness due to its fundamentally technocratic approach––by taking information seriously it suffers a visual white out in the age of profligate information. Nor does the left have any real belief in reality. It senses its own vertigo. And finds stabilization only in the sheer madness of the right. In this sense the left depends on the reactionary and the atavistic as much as does the right. The right serves as its vital yet covert umbilicus to an hallucinatory real.

Rick Santorum

What we hear from Rick Santorum is a profound renunciation of modernity, of the impulse to liberate thought and pleasure, in favor of a far harsher world that submits to authority and instructs its young by the light of the family hearth.  Superficially the authority Rick Santorum promotes is that of Christian religion and Christian values. In this sense his politics are fundamentalist in nature, and reactionary, and they resemble the many other instances of fundamentalist rejection of modern world development––Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, patriarchal fundamentalism, economic fundamentalism. But his espousal of an economic system derived from 19^th-century industrialism is only a deferred espousal of modernity itself. 

He believes in a universal divinely ordered economic system in which coal miners descend into the earth in unregulated mines and communities live in the shadow of coal-fired plants as the sun darkens. In this world he would be a prophet. In this world he would give birth to many miracles and lead a tribe of  asthmatic children toward his clouded paradise where they will await assent from this world which we may mistreat because it is not our true home.

In short he is an hallucinatory shill for the new medievalism of the global order.  

There is nothing behind anything.

There is nothing behind anything.  Behind memory lies nothing—not a lost world to be regained by time travel or a maze of Proustian text.  Behind the apparently solid world lies only a false or evacuated space, charged with an inaccessible energy, like the dark energy that charges the universe and drives it toward an infinite dilution but cannot be found.

Behind the sign lies nothing—not its meaning, which only exists obliquely, so long as we don’t look for it.  Meaning evaporates to the claims of deconstruction, which leaves us only the trace of a wistful cleverness, like a vanishing smile.

Grateful Dead

The rise of Santorum in recent Republican primaries shows continuing conservative discontent with Romney.  The Right mistrusts chameleons and corporate placeholders.  Oddly enough they seem to recognize the threat to their passions that the virtual real constitutes better than the Left recognizes it.  Maybe this is because the Right aspires to stand outside of modernity and from that vantage can better recognize modern oddities of simulation and dissuasion.  I am tempted to say that perhaps the Left has become a simulation and so no longer recognizes the phenomenon that now constitutes it.  But nothing could be clearer than the fact that both movements, Right and Left, are now simulations of history and ideology and self-interest politics in the context of the loss of real history and real ideology and real self-interest.  Real self interest vanished when the real self vanished.  Real ideology vanished when real thought vanished.  Real history vanished when memory vanished.

Some Democrats claim to be elated that the Right is given to rejectionism and extremism.  They believe this ensures Obama’s re-election, and legitimizes their own tendencies toward facile compromise.  But the Left’s satisfaction with a shell-game president such as Obama only betrays its lack of passion and conviction and the bad faith of its constant retreat to one degree left of zero when its values are challenged. 

The function of this placeholder presidency is clear.  It feels pressure only from the Right and so moves to the right in a flourish of self-congratulations.  It seems that the Left is grateful to be dead—guilt-ridden, symptomatic, knowing little, believing in less.

The New Servitude

Zizek, passing through Lacan, make the point that the contemporary push toward permissiveness actually becomes a new form of moral dictum: You must enjoy!  You must have pleasure!  Pleasure becomes a demand.  It takes on the form and function of a superego—the new superego of modernity based on an incessant, demanding, banal, remorseless allegiance to the positive.  You become worthless and unworthy if you do not submit to pleasure.  You become subject to psychiatric treatment if you do not submit to pleasure.  You become the exemplar of a moral lesson that decries repression if you do not submit to pleasure. 

This seems an apt description of the 1970’s in America—that decade which follows the last original moment of liberation, the exhilarating 1960s, and seems by comparison forced or stiff and no longer original.  Pleasure and liberation become a style rather than an original moment, and style in America is the elemental form of demand.  You must be stylish!  You must have style!

The 1970s are already, in the sense of Baudrillard, after the orgy.  The ideology of liberation continues but it becomes hollow.  Liberation suffers the inevitable reversal of a symbolic value pushed beyond its own shadow.  And that reversal had already begun by the time of the Reagan administration.  The 1980s begin a peculiar retrograde movement toward the values of hard work, wealth, patriotism, and the search for original moments found not in the new but in the past.

All this, of course, makes pleasure impossible.  And ushers in a new age of anhedonia: pleasure without pleasure, pleasure that pursue the memory of pleasure, anhedonic nostalgia.

But perhaps in the present moment, it becomes important to think about the surrender of positivity, and the return to a brutal servility that resembles medievalism: then end of democracy, the end of liberation, and the assent of a new, singular, and unassailable power.

The strategy of this power is to remain nameless, to be as invisible as possible, to be internal rather than external and in so doing provide no object agains which to rebel.  Foucault, of course, has already described this movement of power as implicit to modernity and to the development of the modern technocracy.  But what is in evidence now is more virulent.  It is a doubling down of this trope, under the auspices of a peculiarly hollow ideology called globalism.  But the term is more of a veil than a name because it signifies what we may not know, what must remain hidden: a network that approaches the status of an artificial life form that accelerates beyond our capacity to know it and which integrates us as its wetware extension.

Power assumes the mantle of an integrated unyielding reality.  This reality programs out multiplicity and pleasure in favor of singular modes of representation.  It is the tentacled monster from outer space hiding behind the screen.  If we see it for even a second, we are told it is only an hallucination.  Capital becomes an expression of an absolute reality.  Capital no longer within its set of possibilities the expression of critique.  Yes we resemble the Borg, those villains of Star Trek.  Reaganism’s search for an effective symbology led to retrograde movement.  We are now in the same dilemma.  What best expresses our situation can be found in pulp science fiction and comic books.  Beyond these, we are progressively resourceless in envisioning the new servitude.

War and More War

        The United Nations Assistance Mission reports that civilian deaths in Afghanistan reached an all time high in 2011, as security conditions deteriorate and the Taliban, growing stronger rather than weaker, waits out the end of the American incursion.

And David Bromwhich reports on the neocon cabal that pushes us toward war with Iran, while Obama conducts his presidency as an empty place holder drifting reluctantly on the currents of those who are stronger than he, more devious than he, more passionate than he.

In the mirror of infinite war, each step toward a new war looks necessary.  The empire of the mirror multiplies our enemies until they are legion.

Trita Parsi’s book, “A Single Roll of the Dice,” tells the long sad story of America’s eccentric negotiations with Iran, which were cleverly seeded to fail, while Obama poses aloofly as a man of peace driven reluctantly to war.  A Narcissus who believes in the mirror.

Democracy has vanished in favor of empire.  The management of our peaceful domesticity and fabulous illusions demands drug wars and drone wars and sweat shops and “surgical’ incursions.  These unfortunate things are kept out of sight as much as possible, except to serve as sources of terror, that universal energy of capital that goads us toward servility and an emergent new world of technology and medievalism.

There are all sorts of evil things, subliminally crawling beneath the screen of our super bowl ads.

Clowns and Sirens

Three theories to explain the apparent power of extreme negative advertising to sway the voting masses:

1.  The technology of political advertising is inherently dark and cynical.  These are the puppet-masters.  They shrewdly manipulate democracy and in doing so reveal its beastial nature.  This might be termed a Rabelaisian theory.  It implies that democracy never rises far from carnival.  Grotesquerie allows catharsis in the otherwise impotent act of the vote.

2. Human flaws are more credible than human virtue.  In the age of compulsive positivity we no longer believe the positive.  God is dead but Satan lives.  We can’t get a glimpse of the face of God but we see the devil’s everywhere. Hence we are happiest picking between the evils that we know.  In this theory politics becomes a kind of cheaply made pornography.  It exists as a fetish, false memory, and tease.  We are left to imagine the real evil, the real sex, the real politics, behind the lurid facade.

3.  Negative political ads are actually a strategy of revenge, enacted by the electorate against the political class.  By responding favorably to increasingly crass and fraudulent ads the electorate leads the politicians toward self-revelation and self-mockery.  They discredit themselves.  They deride themselves in the lurid mirror of their own performance.  Hence they become smaller and more impotent.  It is like the myth of the sirens, in which it is the electorate’s song of approval that beaches the lusting political class.  The more discredited our leaders, the safer we are.

Pascal's Silence

The universe is not real nor solid nor stable nor necessary. It is contingent. It is probabilistic. All events transpire fundamentally as accidents. Even the great operations of power, the world forming shifts of capital, the extinctions of otherness and the emergence of a global one, hide within their vast power and opacity this sense of accident.  Hence they are vulnerable. Hence all power devised or manipulated by intelligence is fundamentally defensive in nature.  Only intelligence, hiding within the coils of power and vanity, dreams of necessity, immortality, domination.   The greatest release, the greatest happiness, can be found in the full perception of our accidental course: that we have discovered no truth, that all in all we were gift more than necessity.

Beyond Good and Evil

Add Dallin Morgan, 18, seen in this booking photo, was arrested with a fellow high school student on conspiracy charges after authorities uncovered a plot to use explosives during a school assembly.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/27/utah-girl-credited-with-outing-school-bombing-plot/#ixzz1ks3vX3JZ

What do we make of these Utah school bombing suspects?  

They are the perfect transmitters of fantasies already extant in the culture.  As such there is nothing wrong with them.  They may in fact be harbingers of the future, a future in which each neuron, each node of the neural net, each individual, has only the binary response ‘yes’ or ‘no’ available to it.  And the bombing suspects are exemplars of ‘yes’.

Or alternatively, the only and last hope of humanism is a negative virtue, the hope of inhibition, the hope that a last, deconstructionist-proof morality emerges in the individual in an intricate understanding of what must be repressed even as it courses through the collective mind.

This is an old ethical idea—the individual versus the group, moral man versus immoral society.  That somehow the individual, stripped of all belief in positivity by the very triumph of positivity, must somehow construct an inhibitory ethical system equivalent to the discredited social code and able to endure the challenge implicit in the hypocritical ethics of security versus terror—when the giving of terror has become a secret virtue and value of the global monad.

Can an ethical culture be built out of the summation of individual firewalls?  Or rather would such a makeshift system lead only to the further contradiction of ethics?

And what of the idea that these are ‘unthinkable’ crimes, when in fact the adjective ‘unthinkable’ almost always means that the described crime is all too easily thought about?  ‘Unthinkable’ is a peculiar adjective, and odd inversion of positivity and positive morality, implying that evil, the worst of evil, the worst of crimes, are beyond even the thought of the good man or woman, beyond the imagination of the good man or woman.  Evil lies beyond the imagination of the good, and yet we always presume that the tempter must be resourceful enough to understand the good in order to tempt it, in order to seduce it, so we have the familiar problem of the good somehow being less imaginative than evil––being fundamentally stupid, stunned and uncomprehending at the prospect of evil. 

This is of course the model of the entire reaction to 9/11––we were stunned by this unthinkable act, by this unthinkable evil. Yet we’d staged very similar acts of terror as special effects in cinema many times in the past. And inflicted acts of terror of equivalent or far greater evil on others in the recent past.

So the question becomes: must good be ignorant of itself in order to be good?

Proteus

Perpetual war is all but intolerable, except within in a video game, and so perhaps at the limits of tolerance we have entered a dormancy phase in which the wars continue at a lower intensity, as if we sleepwalk through them.  The unreality of these event favors their constant recession from consciousness where they sleep with the other corpses of our forgotten history, to be re-animated as circumstances demand.

There are always other sources of terror available to us.  It may be that it is not so much war that is perpetual as it is terror.  The condition in which there is no longer any ideological ground from which to criticize capital coincides with the emergence of a fundamentally protean form of terror.  

Terror cannot serve as a basis to critique capital.  It is too immediate, too fluid, too easily named and unnamed, and too easily seized upon by the hegemonic power as a justification.  Hegemony and terror are equally protean, equally without justification, except in their entanglement with each other.

As hegemony proceeds toward increasing invisibility, we witness the elimination or disappearance under unsatisfactory circumstances, of many of the iconic figures of terror.  The hanging of Saddam, captured on low resolution video, looked nothing at all like justice, and lacked the untainted symbolism of the toppling of his statue.  Nor did the impromptu video of Qaddafi’s street torture and execution, match the lofty ideals of the hegemonic West.  Bin Laden was removed as if by the wave of a magic hand.  No images were released, except for an animated schematic of the official version of the shooting, as if it had not happened in reality, but only in some virtual space where justice and history are digitized.  Mubarak attends trial in his deathbed.  There is not the sense of fundamental change in any of this.  There is rather the sense of a generational interlude, while the West finds its new form of terror in the specter of economic collapse.

Sisyphus

Woodcutting by William Wolff

And so he is rolling rolling rolling, down the hill, arms tucked in. His head is actually like a rock, it becomes his center of gravity, he is smiling, he is happy, he is building up speed. According to the famous story told about Sisyphus, it was a rock, a giant boulder, a piece cracked loose from the Atlas Mountains, that Sisyphus was condemned to roll up the hill. No one remembered his crime, or his trial, nor the moment when sentence was passed. They remembered only the punishment, this problem of rolling the giant boulder up an enormous hill, and having it again and again slip away, slip out of his hands, as if it were living, as if it were the living will to punish him, just as he neared the top of the hill…

Costa Concordia

Terror is infinitely mutable. Now, all disasters become the equivalent of terrorist acts.

Mickey

What is happening now, in the current election process, is a peculiar feedback loop of fantasies masquerading as an exchange of information. Or it is a duel of fantasies, staged between the media/candidate conglomerate and the silent audience to this fantastic exploitation. At every turn  it is the strategy of the hegemonic power to eliminate the audience/masses as much as possible for the purpose of eliminating them from the  feedback loop and replacing them with a bogey term that secretly hides the hegemonic fantasy, or what might also be termed the master fantasy.  The duel is transformed into a hegemonic circuit.  A rigged house.  From this perspective Romney becomes the master candidate. Resembling an especially well-dressed Disney rodent, infinitely plastic and insubstantial like a hologram, his lack of dimension nullifies the very sense and meaning of an election. The people cannot meaningfully vote for hegemony, because they cannot meaningfully vote against it either. The voting machine itself, its gears and circuits and punch tabs, is hegemonic.

Progress

In considering the destiny of the human race, the concept of progress is inimical to memory. The assertion of progress, or of a progression, a going forward, implies a vector to human events that is independent of the implacable vector of time. It is not just that we have endured, or survived, or that we now stand at the end of the chain of events: it is that we have somehow bettered our condition, materially, socially, existentially. There is no question of ultimately verifying this objectively––the past and the present moment are qualitatively different, beyond comparison. Each is lost to us, each is inaccessible to us, but the mode of this inaccessibility is profoundly different. To assert progress is to subordinate the past, and to subordinate the past is to justify the present. It is, of course, a suspicious symptom that we feel the need to justify the present. It is a symptom closely akin to the necessity of justifying that we are alive instead of dead. From the moment that we first demonstrated a need to understand and symbolically represent death to ourselves, from the very first burials or ceremonies of the dead, including the preservation of dead bodies so that they might continue in the belief that they are still alive, we have felt the need to propitiate the dead, to worship the dead, to fear the dead, to suffer their presence in our dreams. Canetti writes eloquently of the metaphysical implications of the condition of surviving, though, of course, survivorship is a temporary condition. Our past, the chain of  overlapping lives and of intertwined terminations, is a history of errors, and now, finally, in this generation, we have learned to correct ourselves. Or, in the past, we were little more than phantoms in a dream. Now we have awakened, and taken possession of ourselves? . Can this way of thinking stand against the challenge of its alternative, expressed in Genesis in the mythology of the fall and duplicated by the great flood and the catastrophe of Babel: a descent or succession of falls that began outside of history, beyond memory, and expressible only in the pre-Babylonian language now lost to us in which we found our thoughts in the clarity of a perfect form?

Symptom

“A condemnation of life by one who is alive is, in the end, just a symptom of a particular kind of life…” Nietzsche, twilight of the idols,  

 All I have ever aspired to be was a symptom. The illness itself is beyond my understanding, and it is much larger and more important than I am. If one cannot condemn life, that is to say judge life or assert its equivalence to certain valuations,  because one is a part of the living, then certainly one cannot diagnose an illness when one partakes in the disease process. We cannot exchange our identity for any sort of valuation––the same logic applies. We merely strengthen our identity by augmenting its symptoms. Even when we judge ourselves as a nobody, mimicking Ulysses trick at the birth of Western identity, we become only more deeply cemented in who we are. Perhaps all of this illustrates the radical hegemony of language over our lives. Even when we are silent, even when we refuse to speak, that silent refusal is a term of language. It is tempting to assert, against this hegemony, that aphasia offers true escape––not the willful refusal of language, but the actual and unalterable loss of language. But the aphasic does not appear to have escaped his identity nor to have found freedom from language, for aphasia is fundamentally persecutory in nature. The aphasic suffers. The aphasic is haunted acutely by what he or she wishes to speak. Perhaps this is only the memory trace of what language was, perhaps it is the sense of having become a ghost. The dilemma of the ghost is this––he or she is still turned toward the social, still wishes to be enveloped by identity, and love, and purpose, but the possibility of these things is lost, the world itself is lost, the Heideggerian sense of embeddedness in a world is lost. The world itself has withdrawn, disappeared mysteriously, leaving only the naked instrument of the human soul, as in a chilling vacuum, stripped of the ability to speak. 

Jail Break

Is it the political process that imposes stupidity upon the people, or is it the people that impose stupidity upon the political process? Is there any priority of one over the other? Is it possible to locate where stupidity begins? Does it radiate from a single point outward, or does it accrete everywhere at the same time––a mysterious  suffusion that does not obey any recognized aspect of systems theory and operates instantaneously, such that those who would think about the process and discern its truth have already succumbed to it?

Stupidity derives from the Latin root stupidere: to be stunned. And this sense of the word, perhaps lost to us, should be resurrected. Stupidity is not a permanent state or condition, nor is it a cognitive deficit in the usual sense of the term, nor does it necessarily indicate a low IQ. There is something peculiarly modern in all those definitions of stupidity, and the modern age is perhaps better suited to embody stupidity than to penetrate its mystery.

We are stunned. We are in a condition of frozen shut down, and every attempt to provoke us out of this state leads us to withdraw further from the active intellect. Each election, which might be regarded as an attempt to provoke the people toward understanding and choice, takes us elsewhere. Strange monsters and grotesques dance before us.

“It has always been thought… that it is the media which enveloped the masses. The secrete of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in this naïve logic of communication, that the masses are stronger medium that all the media, that it is the former which envelop and absorb the latter.”

Baudrillard, In the  Shadow of the Silent Majority

The will to stupidity may well constitute a deep decision to abandon the modern world to itself, to evacuate it, to hollow it out, to sever it from history and memory, to leave it as a parody of itself, while we follow some deeper escape, daring not utter what that escape is or even to allow ourselves to know it or anticipate it, because all that is preordained and pre-programmed in modernity, all of Burrough’s pre-recorded universe, all that proscribes an original event by anticipating it and rendering it as a series of duplicates before it is even born, would force the information from us and destroy it.