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.