Kafka's Supplicant

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

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

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

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

   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

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

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.