Welcome! A Bridge of Magpies is a blog about culture and politics. Comments are welcome. Also, prophesies, curses, symbolic executions. Presuming I survive, I will always respond.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

ISIS

We can be certain that this drama is being played out in the theater of symbolic exchange.  So much for the possibility of becoming post-symbolic, though the wish to be so is perhaps stronger than ever.
We receive the gift of humiliation and terror.
Our shibboleth is a state of indifference and preoccupation.  The symbolic act attempts to pierce these—the act of an enemy no doubt, but it is by no means clear whether the piercing of our shibboleth, our shield, our armor, is a good thing or a bad thing.  Might we not wish to shed our indifference?  Shed our preoccupation?  If only we could.
It’s already been noted many times that we have mastered the art of waging war indifferently, without passion, by technological remote control, without the historically usual deliberation or thought…just because, so to speak.
But here is the problem for us.  The brutality and grotesquery of the slaughter subliminally speaks to some fragmented desire lurking beneath our indifference.  Desire for what?  For moral justification?  For an inexorable descent into violence?  For the continuation of some sort of virtual fantasy that springs out of real events?

Terror and humiliation circulates quickly throughout the networks.  We slough it off, project it, thoughtlessly.  Absorb it.  Sicken with it.  It leaves us.  It returns to us.  That small hooded man stands upon a precipice beyond his most banal and grandiose fantasies.  He is larger than life.  Briefly.  He will die and it will not matter.  There will be others.  This will be endless.  It exerts a kind of ecological balance, this war of terror, a balance  we have difficulty achieving elsewhere. Each side recoils into itself more deeply.  Technology against the atavistic.  The paradox of a de-stabilizing balance. How strange the stakes of history have become.