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.