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.