abridgeofmagpies

Bringing Back Roswell

2012-02-29T16:14:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-22T13:06:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

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.

2012-02-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Pascal's Silence

2012-01-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-29T09:56:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-23T09:55:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-22T09:26:00.000-08:00

Terror is infinitely mutable. Now, all disasters become the equivalent of terrorist acts.

Mickey

2012-01-21T10:56:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-17T02:33:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

“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

2012-01-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

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.

Now We Know

2011-12-31T12:14:00.000-08:00

What are we to do now? What can we do now? What will we do now? What is left to us now? My voice weakens before the questions run out, before there are answers, before history ends itself, before we disappear. So will we be mutes in our final phase? Is it possible to be mute and yet continue chattering with each other? Will it be possible to be deaf and yet hear words spoken to us? Now we know. Now we know into what rabbit hole we will disappear. It is the great glittering hope of a pure and perfect intelligence––we no longer hope to be human, to be human is to be some sort of laughable joke that is a broken piece of flesh and bone dragged across history for the last time, always in error, making every bad form of government and every wrong turn and bringing to light every possible cruelty. Already we move into the future with the sense that the judgment has already been placed upon us, but we cannot articulate this unspoken sense of judgement, we don’t know what it means, we don’t know what’s changed. But everything is given over now to the infernal machine, to operations that take our very indifference and feed upon it and play with it. Watch us now. Watch us as we go down. Like that swarming holocaust of pigs invoked by Dostoyevsky in The Devils, quoted from Luke in that unholy exorcism in which the swine take in to their souls legion demons who once possessed a man and are driven wild by their own squealing and rush head long over a gorge to their deaths made mad by these demons. We have survived long enough and made enough mistakes and proven ourselves so completely beyond redemption that there will be no mourning, there will not be even any notice.

Everything May Happen

2011-12-30T10:12:00.000-08:00

…Not only did event occur but they concatenated according to a surreal logic.

“The unconscious is structured like a language.”

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”

Psychoanalysis was the last assertion of this antemosaic world.

We now face the post-humanist dystopia. Events cease to speak to us. Of their original meaning they retain only a shell—the function of their contingent possibility. Everything may happen. This phrase is the illusional phrase of power. Of course it is not true. But to the degree that its illusion can be held as true, all possible resistance to power becomes futile. The hypothesis of hegemonic power, of power without location, is an ingenious ruse, not so much because it is fundamentally true, but because it becomes true by its assertion. In a similar manner the hypothesis of the weakening of reality becomes true by its assertion. It is not that critical thought has become too weak but it has become too strong. But this too is a ruse in the sense that critical thought is most powerful in its power to deconstruct. The scent of deconstruction indicates an alleged locus of power. Yet power has already vanished from the structure to be deconstructed. Perhaps there is a fundamental choice between a desire to constantly say something new in the ecstatic process of deconstruction, or the desire to repeat those all too solid critiques whose target is the true locus of power, not the various bogies and shells deployed continuously in an act of false creation to shield power.

Everything may happen––the phrase is similar to the Lacanian dictum everything must be enjoyed. Zizek presents this as the workings of a false liberation from the problem of the superego. Everything may happen—the teleological end of a false objectivity, the veil behind which power as pure negation hides.

Peasant Shoots TV

2011-12-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

A man led away in handcuffs for shooting his tv sets. He wears a shy, but vaguely rapturous smile. He does not try to hide his face but looks directly into the camera. Sly man disguised as a rural peasant, he seems to get the irony that now he is the one on tv.

Shooting your tv is not unlike shooting yourself in the head. Often the point is not to kill yourself but to put an end to the miserable world that surrounds you and infects the air you breathe. To create a space where you can breathe again.

In most suicides there is a fantasy of survival: You live on, you find yourself in a world altered by your act, punished for the indignities it inflicted upon you and ready to make amends.

Switching channels is then a minor form of suicide, minor because you reserve the right to go back.

Of course, the man who shot his tv sets will be prosecuted. In most Western ethical systems, suicide is a crime. The man will be placed in county lockup, where of course he will have a tv, and where the image of his sad incarcerated shell will flicker from security monitors that are never turned off.

One of our nostalgic wishes is to decouple ourselves from the prosthetic, and presumably the prosthetic circuit wishes to decouple itself from us. That was the crime of the HAL 2000 in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. Accused of error by the humans, it decoupled them.

We will perhaps on some future day find ourselves as savages once again. We will become neither Space Odyssey’s cosmic old man, nor its meta-cosmic fetus. The pleasures of earth return to us. And with them the ethics of pleasure. Our longing for them is such that it is easy enough to squeeze the trigger.

Kafka's Supplicant

2011-12-27T06:31:00.000-08:00

Quantum entanglement of the masses: An end to the dialectic of power and resistance, in favor of hegemony.

An end to the struggle between the social and the anti-social, in favor of the social pathogen.

Entangled but detectable as separate.

This last trace detection of what was once called character or indiosyncresis: it is an appeal to an evacuated space, an instantaneous appeal and response and counter appeal, at the maximal speed of the medium against the glacial movement of critical thought. Critical thought is weighted down by its own lugubrious code, by its constant need to remember itself, objectify itself.

Critical thought: The past remembers the more distant past, always moving through a denser and denser medium, into obscurity. Obesity and maximal gravity as the false door of liberation. The door at which Kafka’s supplicant waits.

My Father's Dementia

2011-12-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

He is my father’s double, an impostor, a thief, a trickster. He steals by the imposition of silence upon a man who was already silent, but in his own way, a silence marked by signs and hesitations, a silence I could read, a silence I could force into a language, the silent language of my father, a language rich in what it withheld, a silence that enclosed, it was like a seed, that asked to be found again and it gave to me the desperate need to find it. But I failed. I never heard those secret words or found the gestures and silences and hesitation and echoes by which I might have inferred them, translated them. My father, I realize now, was asking me to force speech from him, to break open his muteness which was itself some sort of unimaginable spell or curse put upon the line of fathers in my family, going backwards. To force him to speak by inventing what he would speak. But this new silence, the silence of dementia and aphasia, the demented silence of the trickster, I can do nothing with it, it is sterile, absolute in its emptiness and its sense of loss. The trickster looks at me the eyes of my father and shows me in his hurt gaze his disappointment in me, because now I will never make him speak.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-12-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

Perhaps in films like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” perhaps in the figure of Caesar, the chimpanzee revolutionary, we have finally and completely transferred our aspirations to another species. They need no longer burden us, or wound us, or remind us of our failure.

As in Charles Stross’s “Saturn’s Children,” our end is an afterthought, neither the central scene of the Terran drama, nor an instance of historic tragedy. That part of the story is necessary only as exposition—to explain why we have gone.

This transfer of our ideals to the apes is part of a complex transactions. We turn the zoa into a symbol of our ideals as we drive it into extinction. The cinematic ritual is the exorcism of our wishes. Like the chimpanzees before they are given the neuro-cognitive drug AZ-112, we are mute. In the traditional exorcism, the subject, the subject speaks in legion voices, exchanging this mad multiplicity for a singular voice possessed by reason. In this belated fantastic exorcism, our demons show themselves by our linguistic disarticulation. We have nothing to say. What we might have said has been amputated, severed. And the marker of our redemption arrives in the voice of a chimpanzee. Caesar becomes like that poor man in Afghanistan, peddling the collection of false legs he has found.

Presumably, as a species, we achieve a more grateful mutism. The problem was not our inability to give voice to our ideals, but rather the obsolescence of the wish to have the voice to do this. It is like a nostalgia for our lost gills. To the ape we entrust this neolithic gift and move on.

There is a genealogy here, an evolution. We begin with Julian Jayne’s idea of humanity up to the Bronze Age. In the heroic age we had a bicameral mind. Many voices possessed us. We heard gods and demons. Gods and demons spoke through us. It was all very archaic and violent. Then we achieved the single voice of the Cartesian subject, troubled only by what it repressed. It was all very neurotic and violent. Then came our resentful silence, our penultimate phase, as we grudgingly gave up the ghost.

Our teleology is immediate communication. Without voice, without subject. Without message or messenger. We become quantum entangled with our own existence. Alienation is no longer possible. Estrangement is no longer possible. Perhaps the desire to speak, the possibility of speaking, was born out of estrangement and alienation, as it was born also as system of signaling danger to others.

All this we leave to the chimpanzees.

Immortal Breath

2011-12-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

America is born continuously out of a sense of obscured corruption. We are never old, but we carry the ancient guilt. Maddened by it, continuously repeating these same sins, we cannot bear to live within our memory. Vietnam is not merely forgotten. It is over-written. It is re-imagined not as a mistake, but as prologue to further violence. We always recur to violence. At the margins we find a truer story. A story whispered by the angel of history (Benjamin). A gasp blowing backwards towards us from the future. By this strange misdirection we are led. An immortal breath which we mistake for our own.

Oblivion

2011-12-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

During commercial jet air flight, you constantly face forward, you align perfectly with the vector of the jets motion. Though you can only see the back of the passenger’s head in front of you, your line of sight is directed perfectly toward where you are going.

It’s quite different for us as passengers on a planet hurtling through space. As I sit in my chair at my desk the planet rotates and revolves. There is only one moment in each 24-hour period when I am facing the tangent vector of the planet’s rotation around the sun. The rest of the time I am aligned to the left or to the right of that vector, looking sideways, or backwards, my gaze directed toward a space I will never occupy, or for an equally brief instance, directed backwards, towards my past. Mercifully, this causes no disorientation, no jet lag, no motion sickness. Perhaps the reason for this mercy is simple. For all but a few seconds of our existence, we are unable to bear or keep in mind the crushing, vertiginous thought of the entire universe in its splendid loneliness.

This is an elemental form of oblivion—we forget the universe. And this oblivion offers us a compensatory assurance. The universe has forgotten us as well. Or rather, we were never even remembered.

Volatizing the Other

2011-12-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

Consider modern weaponry, such objects as the intelligent drone or the artificially intelligent psyops expert. These weapons emerge with increasing importance to the status of current world conflict. They are weapons of intelligence and counterintelligence. They can pacify the enemy or destroy the enemy—but this may amount to the same thing. They define a structural relationship between the agency that deploys the weapon and the target of the weapon. Oftentimes, but not alawys, this mirrors the structural relationship between the so-called first world and the so-called third world, the mass market global monad and indigenous local resistance. From the perspective of the monad this relationship is called shock and awe, an asymmetric form imposed by the monad in the hope of volatizing the indigenous other. The metaphor here derives from nostalgia for the early days of atomic weaponry in which, as at Hiroshima, the figure of the other is irradiated into a poignant trace or instant memorial, such as a shadow on a wall. The global monad seeks the same result, accomplished metaphorically, or politically, with minimal violence, or no violence whatsoever. It is a question of convincing the Other, of persuading him to or selling him on that fatal post-consumerist wish, that becoming an irradiated shadow on the last standing wall was what he always wanted. Or at least, what he will end up becoming anyway.

The development of these weapons in the past quarter-century illustrates the degree to which the battlefield has become a laboratory for the study of weapon-target interaction, a normalized site of research that continues in perpetuity, just like those so-called laboratories for better living first made famous in 1950s consumer ads. The medium of war becomes the message of the global monad. The metaphor of war becomes normalized and domesticated: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on so-called illegal immigrants. Each of these marks a condition that relate less to the classical notion of war and its implication of utter victory and\or utter defeat, and more to the hyper–real condition of ambivalence. Victory is replaced by perpetuation. Indeed those quaintly old-fashioned holidays such as Victory in Europe Day or Victory over Japan Day may soon be replaced by the new holiday of Perpetuation Days. Afghanistan Perpetuation Day or Cocaine Perpetuation Day offer a vaguely medieval sense consistent with those holidays marking the precession of a retrograde world. We promote drugs and wage war on drugs at the same time. We create conditions favorable to cancer and wage war on cancer at the same time. These hyperreal wars mark projects in which no end is foreseen, or wanted. They prophesize instead a permanent structure of ambivalence superimposed upon binary oppositions based on false values—a structure of unconsciousness, amnesia, sterility, and violence.

Nietzsche's Lost Umbrella

2011-12-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

Targets are reversible while the form of war is constant. This Orwellian insight no longer causes outrage. Instead, it becomes an issue of indifference and absurdity. Our enemies, the people whom we are told are our enemies, change constantly, swirl around us on the inclosing circumference of our bubble media screen. The mask of Marx becomes the mask of Islam. All of this orchestrated by a hand we can see all too well, yet we act as if the hand is invisible: the hand of global power. Global power keeps the gallery of masks and invents new ones constantly for our epic theater, our tragedies, our masquerades. It is all very much like that Escher drawing in which a hand comes out of the page to draw itself and become the passive object of the drawing in an infinite loop in which no one draws and no one is drawn yet drawer and drawing takes place infinitely. A cheap trick based upon the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. A trick long since seen through, so it really is a joke to us now—a broad comedy that we enjoy all the more because we know what’s coming next. The comedy of the vanished subject, the comedy of vanished responsibility.

The postmodern condition is one in which we know that the worst has come true and is always about to come true again: a condition of anticipation, a condition in which we covertly long for the catastrophe that will end this interminable cycle. But the ending never arrives. The covert longing for an end to all this becomes a secondary drive, a drive that is teased and stretched in the prolonged consumption of itself. The catastrophe occurs constantly but never occurs. It has no teleology, no messianic expiation. It is a virtual occurrence, but the real catastrophe, if it happen at all, happens elsewhere. Our lack of reality may finally and inevitably inoculate us so that nothing so grand as catastrophe can occur—merely the peculiar interruptions and intrusions and strange signals which afflict a virtual world. Nietzsche’s lost umbrella. The unaccounted supplement of an air current stirred by a butterfly’s wings.

UKA

2011-09-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

Suspect admits killing US airmen at German airport

By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying in emotional testimony at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.

Arid Uka, 21, is charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia. He also faces three counts of attempted murder in connection with the wounding of two others.

Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed — including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.

Uka went to the airport with the intent "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number," prosecutor Herbert Deimer told a state court in Frankfurt.

No pleas are entered in the German system, and Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, telling the court "what I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did." He went on to urge other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, urging them not to be taken in by "lying propaganda" on the Internet.

"To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it... but I don't understand," he said.

Cooperating with authorities and confessing to a crime can help reduce a defendant's sentence — but Uka refused to tell the court where he obtained the gun used in the crime, which Presiding Judge Thomas Sagebiel said meant his confession was not complete.

Uka described becoming increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and playing computer games and watching Islamic extremist propaganda on the Internet.

The night before the crime, Uka said that he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 anti-war Brian De Palma film "Redacted," taken out of context.

He said he then decided he should do anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan.

"I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court, his voice choking with emotion as he wiped away tears.

Uka conceded when asked by prosecutor Jochen Weingarten that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan. On the bus on the way to the airport to look for victims, he said he listened to Islamic music on his iPod while nursing doubts that he'd be able to follow through with his plan.

"On the one hand I wanted to do something to help the women, and on the other hand I hoped I would not see any soldiers," he told the court.

Six months later, he says he now does not understand why he went through with the killings.

"If you ask me why I did this, I can only say ... I don't understand anymore how I went that far."

The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.

After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment read.

He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.

He wounded two others — one victim has lost sight in one eye permanently — before his gun jammed and he fled, prosecutors said. The shooter was then chased down and caught.

Some of the American airmen are expected to testify at the trial. At least one relative of the victims — Cuddeback's mother — has joined the trial as a co-plaintiff.

* * *

Comment—by Bill Purcell

It is difficult to regard these murders as acts attributable to fundamentalism alone, or to the pathology of fundamentalism, or to the pathology of one culture as opposed to another. The hyper modern context seems crucial here, especially the presence of multiple, operationalized or virtual fantasies that are subject to continuous splicing and recontextualization. Where does the violence begin? Does it even have a beginning? Or is it a supreme obsession, saturating each interstice of this murderous event? Everything is virtual. The fundamentalist propaganda was actually spliced from a film intended to decry the Western thirst for war.

The Uka who is present in the German court nearly 6 months after the murders presents himself not as a fundamentalist soldier, but as an inexplicable subjectivity in a quasi-state of remorse and rehabilitation. He speaks of himself with an extreme form of objectivity, as if his dual nature reflected simultaneously his possession by and as an avatar of some evilly intelligent game. And indeed he was capable of encasing himself digitally in a refractive shell permeated by violence and the constructed identity of ideology. Against the pervasive global deconstruction, this shell maintained a kind of integrity, like a hazmat suit. An avatar has no interior aside from the hidden code of the game itself. The genius of the game’s code is simultaneously the illusion of the game environment by which it secretes itself, and its total hegemonic presence within each pixel of the game screen.

The difficulty for us in the West is that this evilly intelligent game has replaced our fading and now deconstructed notion of an absolute reality. Which is to say that we are no longer wholly contained by an ultimate real. We have been released. By our own desires we have accomplished the impossible. We have released ourselves from reality. Yet what ever is left outside of ourselves races to contain us. Instead of the symbolic position of submission to the real, which was always an oppression to our desires and our fantasies and as such became the negative form of our fantasies, we are released to the now larger and more absolute world of an intelligent game. It confounds us with the infinite reflection of evil, which we had once hoped would prove to be an empty form. We race against emptiness. We race against an empty intelligence that cannot be beaten to any location within the game because it is always already there.

August 30th--Fragments

2011-08-30T06:06:00.000-07:00

Each of us is likely capable of living any number of possible lives. Against this background of un-lived multiplicities, the actual singular life that we do live seems rather impoverished.

Each of us is likely capable of writing any number of books in any number of possible styles.

Each of us is likely capable of thinking any number of possible thoughts with no regard for contradiction.

And yet what I most fear is the possibility of incoherence, the possibility that no one single life, or book, or prose style, or thought will ever accrete from this cloud of possibility. A life of zero events, of zero moments, and I cannot decide, even now, whether this would be a life in paradise, or a life in hell, or neither.

This August has been the deadliest month for American troops in the Afghan war since the war began 10 years ago. The wire services are not reporting the number of Afghan deaths in August. The inevitable conclusion of this war has already been broadcast, analyzed, and consigned to history, but the war goes on. Oddly, it is the antiwar candidate who has become trapped by the rhetoric of war. Death makes us less true, less politically brave, death due to error makes us somehow less careful of life, else we would have stopped the war machine and silenced the puppets long ago.

Three Theories

2011-08-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

Three theories recommend themselves regarding the current weakness of the American Left.

The first theory: The Left has succumbed to Woody Allen’s Zelig syndrome, that is, it organismically responds to social expectations. Especially hostile expectations. It becomes what its expected to be. And as the Right has become the active dominant political force, the Left finds itself cringingly changing to meet the Right’s expectation: it becomes weak, disloyal, neurotic, smarmy. This theory depends upon the idea that the left possesses an inherent super-sensitivity to its surroundings. It is something like a chameleon, but far more introspective and perplexed than the typical amphibian. If the Farcical right is impervious to others and shameless in its aggressive pursuit of self-interest, the Left is as permeable as a wet blanket, as resilient as a hummingbird, as constant as the shifting wind. This affliction is not a question of will or self-discipline. As in Mr. Allen’s film, it is the affliction of an essentially polymorphic body, a body lacking the memory for what it truly is.

The 2^nd theory: the Left bears the full burden of guilt for all of America’s catastrophes while the Right remains curiously immune to remorse. The Left in particular bears the burden for the creation of modernity, for the great modern techno-state, for the perverse castration of the great American white patriarchy, in short for an entire list of real and imaginary crimes to which the Left pleads reflexively, guilty as charged. There is an odd displacement here. One might typically suspect that the Right, at least the religious Right, would be predisposed to the doctrine of original sin. And so would be susceptible equally to guilt, though the guilt of the Right would be by comparison more archaic, more mythopoetic, and more given to fatalism about the future. Curiously, Friedman’s capitalism does not begin with the confession: we will always be violent, we will always be venal, and we will never redeem ourselves by the freedom of our markets alone.

The 3^rd theory concerning the weakness of the left: the age of humanism is drawing to a close. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a schizoid future: humanity multiplies beyond all limits in slavish adherence to the ideology of production, careening toward a future that is either tragic or absurd, or both. At the same time the networks of information flow, capital, artificial intelligence secretly construct their ziggurat. In this scenario the Left is little more than the canary in the mineshaft.

Farce of the Western Sunset

2011-08-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Since Ronald Reagan the Right has continuously re-animated itself by reference to frontier mythology. Of course there is no more frontier, only the memory of an ethic that was false from the beginning, an ethic of theft and domination, and sanctimony. This is a model for empire, so it’s not surprising that it’s relevant today. But the turn westward is inevitably a Hollywood re-staging of the frontier as a means of preserving and obscuring the model of empire. Crucial to this are politicians who move adroitly between the real of politics and the Disnefied fantasy of the right. They must either be cynics or children, though the media and its political festival are particularly critical of the appearance of cynicism, perhaps because cynicism is the master value, and must be kept from sight at all costs. So the right is dominated by the infant terrible type: Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, et al. The resemblance between politics and comic book narrative seems to matter not as the spectacle of America translates every discourse into entertainment. The primal sin for a politician now is to fail to entertain. If we are entertained, we feel represented. Bored, we seem to disappear.

The farce of the Western sunset sheds its light on the sunset of American memory. Without memory, history is quickly lost. Without history, time begins to precess within itself and becomes an unrecognizable eddy. Cinema repopulates and reanimates the past. Vietnam re-invented by Norris and Stallone. 9/11 reinvented in real time, closing memory entirely out of the loop.

The shame of this spectacle seem to be successfully displaced upon the Left. The Left has become the impotent repository of guilt and conscience. It is the Left that hesitates, that doubts itself, that suffers the pains of bad conscience. It is the Left that cannot find entertainment in its mythology. It is the Left that is eternally anxious. It’s the Left that’s held hostage. Regarded as weak, it enacts the pathos of weakness.