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.