apocalyptic sublimity [IV]

1. apocalyptic sublimity [I]
2. apocalyptic sublimity [II]
3. apocalyptic sublimity [III]

[C]ould not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement). - Frederic Jameson

Yes, I am bringing you another installment! I think this quote by Fred Jameson really gets at something that is current. It's something that Chris Hedges has tapped into - the "Weimarization of the working class"

There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

Hedges also has yet another interview - at Salon.

In the beginning of the book, you write briefly about covering wars in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. How did that shape the way you understand these social forces in America? What similarities do you see?

When I covered the war in the Balkans, there was always the canard that this was a war about ancient ethnic hatreds that was taken from Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts." That was not a war about ancient ethnic hatreds. It was a war that was fueled primarily by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. Milosevic and Tudman, and to a lesser extent Izetbegovic, would not have been possible in a stable Yugoslavia.

When I first covered Hamas in 1988, it was a very marginal organization with very little power or reach. I watched Hamas grow. Although I came later to the Balkans, I had a good understanding of how Milosevic built his Serbian nationalist movement. These radical movements share a lot of ideological traits with the Christian right, including that cult of masculinity, that cult of power, rampant nationalism fused with religious chauvinism. I find a lot of parallels.

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I'd met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn't exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

It adds to the discourse follwoing these main points that I think are prescient from the previous posts and bloggers.

1. Can we even imagine a world post - global capitalism?
2. Is our pre-occupation with the 'end' truly rooted in our "understood" failure as a society?
3. Have we passed a threshold without even realizing it on political and social levels?
4. Is there a conscious drive to destroy ourselves fueled in part by our obsession plot?
5. Is the way forward fighting for the trace hopes of aspirations past? (Zizek)

I think we have to really consider Zizek's parallax on the impossibility of the social itself. Rather "that the social is not one or the other (communitarian organic bonds versus collections of autonomous and self-determining individuals), but rather the very tension between these two conceptions of the social." I think Jameson's point from the qoute above also supports this notion of inbetween tensions - of a deep sense of failure and rage:
"[C]ould not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level"

We all know that Apocalyptic mythology has always been around in virtually all cultures and all human traditions. In modern times, it plays a distinct role within politics (fascist) and taints most propaganda and discourse in various ways depending on the era. It was faithfully employed by the Nazis as an obvious example but even crops up in left-leaning concerns like climate change - although I think we can all concede that in the case of gloabl warming we are likely to be treated to some maximal consequences quite soon. Increasingly (it seems) apocalyptic thinking is an important part of much modern conflict, as a mechanism for galvanizing populist support. The examples are endless, ranging from Hamas, Christian Zionists or the messianic settler movement in Israel.

A recent commentor at I Cite brought a forward a great example of the political ramifications of apocalypticism. He notes the infamous Italian zealot Savonarola (not to mention English and American revolutionary periods) via PGA Pocock. "Pocock makes some interesting comments on how the apocalyptic changes one's relationship to time and how one sees time. For Pocock, what happened in Savonarolan Florence, for example, was that the apocalyptic message brought time down to earth--so to speak--giving the believers the idea that they had a direct role in the outcome of history. This opposed the Augustinian conception of time and the two kingdoms, since in that framework the two worlds did not intersect except at the end of time, which God was in control of and which humans had no role to play."

This active role is what played so well to the masses surviving the Weimar years and what I suspect is fueling the rise in Pentecostalism among the American Middle and Working classes (as one example). The Penetcostal church was begun at the turn of the 20th century in Topeka and/or Los Angeles. One unique feature was its integration of white and black followers - unheard of in 1906 - which defintely helped keep the faith on the margins until the 1950's.
Today it is growing rapidly and influencing other evangelical groups as more and more people are receiving the special gift of the holy spirit. The most recent being the Toronto Blessing. My point in going into detail here is that this particular brand of fundamentalism has growing appeal partly because of its focus on passion, special spritual gifts, and the ecstasy not only of God but community -erasing pain, class and race. In short average people have given up on modernism, science, and capital/caste. There is a parallel with the rise of the broader (social/political) evangelical movement and the shift of the American economy from manufacturing to a service based economy which has decimated the middle class through outsourcing and wage depression while simultaneously undermining the American Labor Union. The union provided a voice and communitty function that is largely missing from suburban life. As the power and influence of evangelicalism has risen, largely because its success at framing much of the social and political discourse through logocide, the quality of life for the average worker has plummeted. Only 8% of the working population has acces to a union. The lowest since the inception of labor. This imbalance is critical to quality of life issues and opens the door for alternative narratives for success. Consider that there are 70-100 million evangelicals in America alone- 200,000 churches. 84% of Americans except Jesus as God's Son, the same number believe they will face God at Judgement Day and 1/3 are expecting the Rapture any day now.

Larval Subjects has this to add recenty:

The central feature of apocalyptic narratives seems to be that they present the time of action as deferred, as if we are powerless in the present, unable to do anything now to transform our social conditions as the forces of capital are too strong to be resisted and fought against. The time of the now, of the present, has disappeared. Or, put otherwise, the present no longer appears as an actable space. Fundamentalist apocalyptic narratives become powerfully attractive under such conditions, as they promise the possibility of a post-apocalyptic world where these antagonisms are resolved and the disruption at the heart of the social is finally pacified. The problem, of course, is that in being seduced by these narratives, the followers are led to endorse a number of other downright frightening things at the level of policy... Policies that are often directly against their own self-interests...
missing from these discussions is the role played by the contemporary hegemony of the "discourse of the victim". One of the uncanny points of identity between both left and right is the primacy of victim discourses as the only authentic position from which to formulate an ethics and politics. Thus we have victimhood as minority status on the left, and the perceived persecution of Christians and white heterosexual males as the dominant trope on the right. One question worth asking is why politics must today take the form of a discourse of the victim. I haven't come up with any answers to this question, yet it does seem that "being-a-victim" confers one a minimal ontologically substantiality or identity in a world where identity has progressively been virtualized and rendered precarious by the collapse of the big Other.

Sinthome really hits it on target - the why, or rather central theme here is a victim narrative, which is used steadfastly in maintaining or renegotiating our apocalyptic dread/ectstasy fantasies. Consider this from scholar Robert O. Paxton (via Chris Hedges):

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

i'll close with that for tonight


painting: Frederic Church

the minimum wage

What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

Umberto Eco: 14 ways of looking at a Blackshirt

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

* * *

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.

In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.

In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

* * *

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Umberto Eco (c) 1995


via themodernword

Sam Harris vs. Andrew Sullivan

If you don't know Sam Harris - you should. Get a copy of The End of Faith and see if you aren't altered in some substantial ways. It is a fascinating and impeccably argued book about the nature of faith. If you are a believer - you may get rattled by it. That cage rattling is exactly what is happening in a discussion, rather smackdown between Harris and Andrew Sullivan over at beliefnet. When it comes to critique - Harris is a force. Here's a sample:

Contrary to your allegation, I do not "disdain" religious moderates. I do, however, disdain bad ideas and bad arguments--which, I'm afraid, you have begun to manufacture in earnest. I'd like to point out that you have not rebutted any of the substantial challenges I made in my last post. Rather, you have gone on to make other points, most of which I find unsurprising and irrelevant to the case I have made against religious faith. For instance, you claim that many fundamentalists are tolerant of dissent and capable of friendship with you despite their dogmatic views about sex. You also remind me that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. You could catalogue such facts until the end of time, and they would not begin to suggest that God actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that his Son came to earth in the person of Jesus to redeem our sins. I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who are likewise tolerant of dissent and perfectly cordial toward homosexuals. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr. (that very randy and unscrupulous dowser) by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? Do all the good pagans throughout history suggest that Mt. Olympus was ever teeming with invisible gods? As I have argued elsewhere, the alleged usefulness of religion--the fact that it sometimes gets people to do very good things indeed--is not an argument for its truth. And, needless to say, the usefulness of religion can be disputed, as I have done in both my books. As you may know, I've argued that religion gets people to do good things for bad reasons, when good reasons are actually available; I have also argued that it rather often gets people to do very bad things that they would not otherwise do. On the subject of doing good, I ask you, which is more moral, helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think God wants you to do it? Personally, I'd much prefer that my children acquire the former sensibility. On the subject of doing bad: there are, at this very moment, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims drilling holes into each other's brains with power tools in the suburbs of Baghdad. What are the chances they would be doing this without the "benefit" of their incompatible religious identities?

Ouch! do take the time to read the whole thing

via Larval Subjects

Alexey Titarenko

lens culture has a conversation with Russian photographer -Alexey Titarenko. I'm new to the artist and these are really stunning images. Like a contemporary Etienne Jules Marey mired in the masses of a changing Russia. - more pics at artnet.

great tip by wood s lot

artist beach digs

Affordable housing for artists ... near the beach! Saw this over at Lisa Hunter's site:

Patchogue, Long Island, is being considered for an affordable housing project for artists, to be developed by Artspace. But first, Artspace needs to conduct a survey of regional artists, so the village administrators are asking artists from NYC, Long Island, and Connecticut to participate. If you're interested, please send your contact information to:

Marian H. Russo, Esq.
Executive Director, CDA
Incorporated Village of Patchogue
www.patchoguevillage.org
mrusso@patchoguevillage.org


very intriguing.....

State of the Union - the Words

Here's a very cool chart on the word choice within the State of the Union Address over the last few years. Over 34,000 words uttered by the decider. See here at the NY Times.

caught up in the spirit

"I have a soft spot in my heart for literalists because I used to be one," he said in the film. "There's nothing wrong with a fifth-grade understanding of God [or the Bible], as long as you're in the fifth grade." - Rev. Laurence Keene

The past weeks have seen more attention (so it seems) and substantial dialogue on the religious right. Much is do in part to the new Chris Hedges book and also the interview with Jim Wallis.

Maud Newton has a heartfelt and darkly humorous "testimonial" on Jesus Camp -the embattled evangelical summer camp for kids which has been accused of brainwashing.

Jodi Dean speaks on the film Hell House which follows a local church's efforts to gain converts using "alternative" theater during Halloween. She describes the believers as loving and earnest - something that shouldn't be lost upon observers. This human diminsion is real and we have to come to terms as to why people are turning increasingly to carismatic faiths and cultist fantasies of escape, Utopia and of course revenge. The world is evil and the believers are the beleagured weathering the constant venom of that world. All zealousy is based on some form of this. Even Scientology places itself in opposition to modernity through the filter of psychiatry.

Seemingly right on cue there is another piece with Chris Hedges, this time at alternet.

The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Now consider that millions are believing that position in some form or another - not in refugee camps but at the local strip mall.


* Also I'm sort of surprised I'm only coming to this website now but the Evangelical Right is a great place to catch up on all things theocratic.


image: HLIB

American Tabloid: Obama Smear gains force

We all knew this was coming. It started innocently enough a couple of weeks back. Now the full court press is on. It's as if the KKK itself is distributing 'litrature' about the new manchurian candidate Barack Hussein Obama! The infiltrator seeking to undermine a Christian nation with his evil moslem ambitions. James Elroy couldn't have scripted it better - it's right out of American Tabloid! The similarities to the 2000 South Carolina whisper campaign against John McCain are startlingly. You remember that right? Karl Rove and Ralph Reed depicting McCain as a brainwashed agent of the Viet-Cong, with his illegitimate children, drug addled wife and plans for a 'queer' army? It would be laughable if it wasn't true and if it hadn't actually SWAYED voters.

Well we have a new whisper campaign being spread by Glenn Beck, NY Post, and generated by Debbie Schlussel. It appears the roots of this are with Insight Magazine which is part of the Washington Times 'empire' owned and operated by the $billion dollar donor to the GOP - the grand master himself, your favorite Messiah - Rev. Sun Myung Moon!

Wake the Hell up America.

image: Fox News via Seventh Sense

Edward Burtynsky's visions of a hyper-industrialized world.

"A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions … apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" - by Harold Pinter

So I’m taking a moment here from the apocalyptic (well sort of!) to look at this recent interview with Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. He’s pretty much a household name at this point but if you are by chance unfamiliar you should know that he has been building an incredible body of work over the last 25 years looking at the relationship between humanity and consumer desires as plays out on geologic and maximal scales.

Here is Burtynsky on the quote above:

"Truth is open to a lot of interpretations in the artist's hands. I think, what Pinter is saying is that, as a global citizen you are responsible for asking a question: do I agree with particular politics, do I agree with a direction we are being lead. As a citizen you have to make a decision how you feel about the world, what you think is right. As citizens, it's our responsibility to move out of the domain of creating reflections on humanity into the domain of acting on our beliefs." "As a citizen I do take a pretty strong stand. I do believe that there are serious environmental consequences to what we do and what we don't. There are millions of little things we can do every day. We're making decisions about the kind of cars we drive, how we insulate our houses, how wastefully we use the water and what we do with our old computers. These are real things that make a difference, millions of these decisions done by millions of individuals." - Burtynsky

Christopher Grabowski has some great questions for the artist - here's a few that seem particularly acute for recent postings around the blogosphere.

On why the news media isn't really getting the big story:

"Mainstream news media has a problem with it because they are searching for the breaking story that would sell papers. They're always on the search of headline grabbing material. At the same time, the news media are very top down hierarchal organizations that are not very good at allowing creativity. They are not very good at allowing the people who are on the ground, seeing things first hand, to become a feedback system to back up the organization's pyramid."

On why he decided not to photograph the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"I've photographed several natural disasters in the past and have decided that it is to close to spot reporting for me. You're in and out very quickly. The thing I was interested in was the slow burn, not the ka-boom, the things and processes that gradually create the world we live in, the processes that we tend to see as normal, as opposed to a tsunami or a hurricane.
"I focus on a world that we're consciously creating. The Three Gorges dam under construction on the Yangtze River looks like a disaster but it was a conscious decision to tear all these cities apart, to relocate 1.5 million people and to build new homes for them beyond the flood area. It was a conscious, industrial transformation of the landscape.
"I don't think it's been adequately covered. As far as I know, I am the only guy who ever went there with a 4x5 camera. In many places up the river, I was the only professional photographer people said they'd seen."

[my post regarding this very topic: Soth, Polidori and Katrina]

On whether photographs reveal or conceal the truth:

"I constantly face questions concerning truth and distortions. As an image-maker I have degrees of control on how I tell my stories. If there is a piece of plywood somewhere in the corner of my frame that catches the sun and burns a hole in my image, I may consider moving the plywood, or if access is difficult, to remove the reflection in the Photoshop. Now, if I take that same image and paste some people into it and introduce some staged narrative without telling anybody about it, that would create a challenge to the traditional trust in the relationship between the image, the creator of the image and the viewer.
"Having said that, photography can be used in various, non-documentary, forms depending on how the author wants to engage the audience. The meaning can be found in making something up completely, a flight of imagination can sometimes have more to do with truth about poverty than, let's say, a straight picture of a street scene."

On simplistic framing of images – and issues:

"I started my work off saying: look these are the complex issues here; there is a definite disconnect between what we consciously do and what the global reality of what we do is.
"To me, if you build your polemics around the point that all corporations are bad, it lacks the necessary complexity, it is just too narrow and almost a caricature of a view. There are some bad corporations and some good corporations. There are some very bad people who work for the corporations but it is also quite easy for some environmentalists to feel self-righteous, to get up on the soapbox without the full grasp of the complexity of the problem.
"My goal is to allow dialogue, not to draw lines and start throwing things at each other again, because this has not gotten us anywhere all these years. It pleases me if my work does something to arouse consciousness, to increase dialog or to influence people to make real personal changes, which is the only thing that makes a difference, as far as I am concerned."

On whether a still image works differently on our consciousness than a documentary film:

"Absolutely, I do believe that a still image fixes in the consciousness in a whole different way than a documentary film does. With a film we are caught up in following the narrative and we don't really pay attention to the images. The still image does fix into the memory, it locks in, it's easier to recall. It has a role in raising consciousness and it does it differently than a documentary film. One might say that film is more compelling because you're more driven to understand the theme but the film doesn't recall the same way in our minds. What I recall from the Vietnam War is not the video footage; it's Eddie Adams' images that stick in my mind."

On whether artists need to be analytical, like anthropologists:

"People who are engaged in art are engaged in a process of thinking beyond the present moment, looking both forward and backward, reflecting on how the human story plays itself out. In a way, art is a research and development department. It shows us new places we can go in terms of thought; it makes us reflect upon our actions, our ethics; it questions our definitions of good and evil.
"I believe that culture is key to a healthy society. So many people are caught so entirely in the process of working and making a living that society needs somebody to put a mirror up, to open up our consciousness to the things that are out of sight, out of mind."

Full interview at the Tyee

image: Edward Burtynsky

via wood s lot

apocalyptic sublimity [III]

1. apocalyptic sublimity [I]
2. apocalyptic sublimity [II]

So this discussion on apocalyptic culture continues. The previous posts reference contributions by Alec Soth, Jodi Dean, Poetix, K-Punk, Larval Subjects and Rough Theory. (These are great blogs – read them!)

To briefly summarize, here are the main observations from the previous posts:

1. Peter Schjeldahl: The present widespread disarray and morbidity of the arts in Western civilization represent, it occurs to me, a long-term toxic effect of the atom-bomb terror of the last three decades…Most insidious of the terror’s by-products is what I’ll call the no-future effect. Conditioned to living on the eve of doomsday, we have lost the ability to conceive of a future stretching farther than our own most distant personal goals or responsibilities.

2. Jodi Dean: what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory? I need the first point in order to account for the persistence that is in the process of fading and dissolving. So we persist, but the distinctions are fading, and with it, the people we have been, the lives we have led. At any rate, the incompleteness of the theory, its failures, also indicate that it's right (in the grand tradition of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the disproof is the greatest proof): the failures indicate the process of dissolution in which we are caught. Clarity is lost, impossible now that the world has ended and we are but drifting components of its dwindling memory

3. Poetix(Dominic): Socialism or Barbarism: the slogan presents itself as if it were describing a moment of decision, a fork in the road. The decision cannot be deferred any longer, the slogan insists: it must be taken immediately. But nothing seems easier to believe than that there is now no choice: barbarism is what is, to an already frightening and intensifying degree, and it is even more what is to come. We have gone too far down that road, impelled along it by all that seems most intransigent, most unalterable, about our “nature” or our “condition”. Once it seems that the moment has passed when things might have turned out otherwise, does not the slogan lose its cogency? ...
The conventional form of the urgent call to action, in the face of some existential menace, is “no future, unless…”.

4. K-Punk: If it is increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, that is because the world has already ended. In this condition of mors ontologica, the world goes on, but nothing new can ever happen; what remains is a mechanical permutation through options that have already been fixed…The time to act was in the past; the damage is done; all we can do is await consequences which can no longer be averted...

5. Larval Subjects(Sinthome): considers collective apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. That is, could not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement).

6. Rough Theory(N Pepperell): presents Adorno’s considerations on socialization-All of these things, Adorno suggests, encourage susceptibility to forms of mass mobilisation that are directed specifically against the realisation of potentials for transformation, and that tap into impulses to destroy others (particularly members of vulnerable minorities whose social exclusion can be misrecognised as unmerited freedom from hated social constraints) as well as desires for self-destruction.
Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” - particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute.

I'd like to look a recent follow up on the previous posts by K-Punk. - After the end, again.

He asserts that there is a difference between the UK and US popular unconscious when it comes to apocalyptic dread (I think we can consider apocalyptic fetish as a parallel to that dread). K-Punk cites the Cold War as the truly apocalyptic era where the fear of nuclear destruction was a daily ritual of anxiety and nightly dreams of annihilation.

Jodi is right that there is no British equivalent to the religious apocalypticism that features so prominently in American cultural life but this is less apocalyptic dread than apocalyptic ecstasy, a fevered anticipation of the Rapture.The kind of apocalyptic dread I am referring to was in any case far too pervasive to be reduced to particular cultural artefacts; nor was it confined to religious groups. There were, of course, innumerable films, novels and songs which explicitly dealt with apocalypse of one kind or another, but the dread was so widespread, so deep-rooted, that it amounted to a psychic climate. Jeff Nuttall's indispensable Bomb Culture went so far as to claim that the impulse behind postwar popular culture in its entirety was the virtual presence of nuclear war.

K-punk rightly observes that such ‘end time’ dread was pervasive background noise – not unlike what Schjedahl observed in 1978. However, for him this dread is no longer present now in the UK though assumingly still alive in the US.

Certainly, Sinthome's remarks - in particular, his claim that 'apocalyptic fantasies' are 'omnipresent' in American culture - suggest that apocalypse has retained its hold on the American unconscious. The key passage in Sinthome's post is the following, where, in an echo of similar claims by Fredric Jameson, he makes the case that apocalyptic fantasies mask disavowed utopian impulses:

[C]ould not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement). - Frederic Jameson

Continuing, he mentions that alongside Larval Subject’s 'hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content', N Pepperell at Rough Theory suggests that 'we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously ... on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.' He wonders if the ‘fantasies’ mentioned by Larval Subjects are more aptly called ‘survivalist’ fantasies as the by product of a stripped down ‘self’ – a ‘minimal self’ resultant of continuing waves of catastrophe and threat.

I want to reflect back for a second on some of the links earlier and the type of environment imagined in Children of Men. I have pointed to Guantanamo, Corrections Corp. of America as well as the timely conceptual/political art of the zone-interdite project. In accordance with these notations on the budding exclusion and isolation zones – non-places purposed for containment and control - Nick Turse via Tom Dispatch.com writes of the future envisioned by the Pentagon.

Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums outlines the following philosophy and futures strategies of the US military.

For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future - not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet. For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future - not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet.

The report is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA sees the following:

the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or State Department types fear to go ... [T]hey now assert that the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor."

In fact, this past October the U.S. Army issued its latest "urban operations" manual. "Given the global population trends and the likely strategies and tactics of future threats," it declares, "Army forces will likely conduct operations in, around, and over urban areas - not as a matter of fate, but as a deliberate choice linked to national security objectives and strategy, and at a time, place, and method of the commander's choosing." Global economic deprivation and poor housing, the hallmarks of the urban slum, are, the manual asserts, what makes "urban areas potential sources of unrest" and thus, "[i]ncreases the likelihood of the Army's involvement in stability operations." And "idle" urban youth (long a target of security forces in the U.S. homeland), loosed in the future slum city from the "traditional social controls" of "village elders and clan leaders" and prey to manipulation by "nonstate actors" draw particular concern from the manual's authors.

It’s well worth the reading the whole as it mentions rumerous contractors building wildly futuristic weapons and intelligence systems that will transform life as we know it. Think Terminator, Robocop, Blade Runner etc. etc. The desire is to shape and control conflict as it unfolds.

As alarming as these plans and omnipotent gadgets are, what is terrifying is the FEAR and apocalyptism that is at the heart of these multi- $billion dollar R&D initiatives. That fear is the sending of troops into an enemy-friendly urban mega-slum which punctuates a future vision of international periphery zones for the elite and the scorned. The metropolis is the future battle field. As Nick Turse points out there is a dark irony at play here. Ever since the U.S. high command moved into its self-described virtual “city” – the Pentagon has had a distinct inability to decisively beat anyone save its weakest enemy. Though able to cause massive casualties and
historical destruction, the war machine has proven rather unremarkable in achieving its goals.

Despite this reality-

Now, the Pentagon has decided to prepare for a fight with a restless, oppressed population of slum-dwellers one billion strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25 million people per year. To take on even lone outposts in this multitude - like any of the 400 cities of over 1 million people that exist today or the 150 more estimated to be in existence by 2015 - is a fool's errand, a recipe for both carnage and quagmire.

These statistics should give us all great pause. I'll close this installment with what Larval Subjects has to say by way of Lacan.

For Lacan, of course, the real must not be confused with reality. Where reality is understood as a combination of the symbolic and the imaginary characterizing the familiarity of our everyday lifeworld, the real is to be properly understood as the impossible or those formal deadlocks that haunt the symbolic and prevent its closure


painting: Franz Johnston

apocalyptic sublimity [II]

The place where they lay, it has a name - it has none
- Paul Celan

The previous installment ended with this by Jodi Dean:

Apocalypto imagines past apocalypse--not future. And, Children of Men imagines present apocalypse…. I came away overwhelmed by a cliche (which says nothing about the movie per se, in other words, don't blame the movie)--if Guantanamo is in the world, then all the world is Guantanamo. Although this is a cliche, it may apply more than we think…. the 'solution' of containment zones for troublemakers just seems obvious...

Are we living in macro-micro containment zones as pictured in Children? Consider some evidence in America as posted by Latina Lista on the holding facilities in texas for illegal immigrants. Also consider this alarming story by Subtopia on the booming business of border fences across the globe.

It seems almost every month there emerges from some border ‘zone’ a proposal to build a new fence. One might think the border fence is as popular to the construction industry today as the global skyscraper, the suburban tract home, or the gated community. In fact, who is to say they are not somewhat at least symbolically interconnected. Anyhow, this month it is Pakistan who announced “a new solution to the problem on its western frontier.” That is, according to this report: “mines and fences along the Afghan border, designed to keep militants from crossing in and out of the tribal zone.”

(The post goes onto link many previous posts on borders – well worth clicking)

Then there is this project - Zone*Interdite by Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud
as noted by Outside the Ivory Tower blog.

Since early 2000 the two Swiss citizens have been collecting data on military exclusion zones and presenting a compilation of the data on the website www.zone-interdite.org. The platform is linked up with a Google search function, meaning that information available via Google can be called up for the now circa 2.000 entries with just one mouse-click – a function that is as low-key as it is stunning, for it offers visitors to the site effortless direct access to a plethora of information and images about the individual zones, although the military obligation to kept restricted data confidential dictates that the general public should be kept in the dark as much as possible and certainly should not be told the truth via images.

If you go to the artist’s site : Zone Interdite - you can visit Camp Delta at Guantanamo, Coleman Barracks – Germany, an Islamic training camp – Sudan, and Bagram Airbase – Afghanistan. It’s a very interesting project and well defined in its aims at connecting/mapping the power apparatus - rather the complex phenomena of perception triggered by prohibiting such perception.

These micro- geographies, fragmented place/zones are starting to proliferate globally which seems to declare an entropy - a passage out of the traditional nation-state structure into something more reductive, barbarous and splintered. So to repeat Dean, if apocalypticism is present, does that mean that the world hasn't already ended?And what of "other worlds? It is precisely because other worlds have been that there remains a glimmer of hope for other worlds to come. David Graeber has suggested something similar in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He asks:

What sort of social theory would actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs?
- it would have to proceed from the assumption that another world is possible.
That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we'd all be better off as a result. To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible. But one could also say that it's this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative: Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today?

As Dean pointed out, Zizek takes a somewhat similiar commentary as he suggests that our political duty today is to keep these past traces alive, to recall past aspirations. This reminds me of Morris Berman’s assertion of the need for a new monastaticism to protect the best of Enlightment values and the pursuit empirical knowledge as a bunker against the decline in law and education and the increased reliance on "special" knowledge to explain the world - ie. ancient religious texts. * Zizek on Children of Men link.

The conversation on 'the end' takes a slight turn with a psycho-analytic musing on our new sense of apocalypse - Larval Subjects blog summons Freud to testify.

Apocalypse Now Redacted

The question revolves around the issue of whether or not the damage to the world is irrevocable and whether another world is possible (i.e., whether there's a limit to capitalism or an alternative to capitalism). Rather than directly taking a stand on these questions, I would instead like to approach the issue psychoanalytically from the standpoint of collective fantasies.

One of the things I began noticing a few years ago is that I was encountering patients whose sexual and amorous fantasy life was deeply bound up with visions of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization. For instance, I would encounter patients who had all sorts of fantasies about post-apocalyptic settings such as life after an eco-catastrophe, nuclear war, a massive plague, or a fundamental economic and technological collapse, where, at long last, they would be able to be with the true objects of their desire and their life would finally be meaningful (struggling to survive, to rebuild the world, etc). As I reflected on this phenomenon a bit, I began to notice that these sorts of fantasies populate the social space everywhere. In cinema there is an entire genre of apocalyptic films from both rightwing and leftwing perspectives such as Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Dante's Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, and many more I cannot remember. In the world of "literature" the Left Behind novels have been a stunning success, selling millions of copies and leading to popular television shows and made for television movies. In news media, of course, we are perpetually inundated with apocalyptic threats from eco-catastrophe, to the bird flu, to the threat of massive meteors hitting the earth or supervolcanos exploding or even a star going supernova and evaporating our atmosphere, to terrorist attacks employing nuclear or bio-weaponry. The Discovery and Science Channel regularly devote shows to these themes.

While I am certainly not dismissing the possibility of these threats, the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenerios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions of the present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the ubiquity of these scenerios in popular imagination... An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room?

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud presents an interesting take on how we're to understand anxiety dreams such as the death of a loved one. There Freud writes that, another group of dreams which may be described as typical are those containing the death of some loved relative-- for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister, or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief, so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may even weep bitterly in his sleep.

Here, perhaps, would be the key to apocalyptic fantasies: They represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. That is, could not the omnipresence of apocalyptic fantasies in American culture be read as an indication that somehow we have "given way on our desire" or betrayed our desire at a fundamental social level? That is, these visions simultaneously allow us to satisfy our aggressive animosity towards existing social relations, while imagining an alternative (inevitably we always triumph in these scenerios, even if reduced to fundamentally primative living conditions... a fantasy in itself), while also not directly acknowledging our discontent with the conditions of capital (it is almost always some outside that destroys the system, not direct militant engagement).

As such, these fantasies serve the function of rendering our dissatisfaction tolerable (a dissatisfaction that mostly consists of boredom and a sense of being cheated), while fantasizing about an alternative that might someday come to save us, giving us opportunity to be heroic leaders and people struggling to survive rather than meaningless businessmen, civil servants, teachers, etc. Perhaps the real question with regard to this pessimism, then, is that of how the utopian yearnings underlying these representations and the antagonisms to which they respond might directly be put to work.

Rough Theory blog follows this tack with a slight tangent by looking at Adorno as opposed to Freud. Here the concern is more about the importance of physochological theory to the general project of critical theory but does point out an interesting sub-text to the apocalypse discussion.

For present purposes, since the topic of apocalyptic fantasy started me on this tangent, I will explore only one: Adorno’s proposal for how a critical psychology might complement a critical sociology in making sense of the appeal of social movements that seem oriented specifically to destruction.
Since Larval Subjects’s post provided the immediate spark for these reflections, I’ll briefly draw attention to some elements of that post to get us underway. Larval Subject begins by citing examples of apocalyptic fantasies from a wide range of contexts, and then asks how we should understand this phenomenon.
Larval Subjects thus expresses the hope that apocalyptic fantasies manifest a desire for something other than their explicit content - something more than the desire for destruction and death. I raise this point, not to hold up Freud’s text against LSs appropriation …but because I think it provides a good frame for understanding Adorno’s very different attempt to merge psychoanalytic theory with sociology in the service of critique. If Freud offers two interpretive paths, one of which LS has followed in the hopes that apocalyptic fantasy might signify a non-manifest content - a longing for transcendence - we can understand Adorno’s work as an attempt to reflect seriously on the second path - on the possibility that certain mass movements might genuinely desire to achieve what their fantasies express: destruction and death.

Adorno’s argument is complex - and not necessarily in ways that are productive for theoretical reflection by those not committed to Adorno’s own framework. For present purposes, I won’t attempt to outline Adorno’s interpretation in any comprehensive way, but will instead comment on just a few elements within a single text: Adorno’s “Sociology and Psychology”, published in the New Left Review in two parts, in Nov-Dec, 1967, and Jan-Feb 1968.

Adorno begins this text with a rejection of the concept of objective historical laws, and suggests - as I have suggested above - that this rejection implies the need to supplement a critical sociological theory with a critical psychology. Much of the article then revolves around two arguments:

1. a critique of other attempts to merge sociology and psychology
2. an often scathing critique of Freud and of various psychoanalytic traditions, in the service of an attempt to appropriate Freudian categories in a more historicised and critical form.

Adorno’s arguments are often brilliant and provocative, and I will try to revisit them in appropriate detail in another post. For present purposes, however, I want only to isolate out a couple of points that seem - to me, at least - to have potentially broader relevance for theoretical reflection on the psychological undercurrents of mass movements.(apocalypticism)

What I find particularly interesting and disturbing in this text is the very simple and, once stated, obvious question that motivates Adorno’s analysis:
What might happen, psychologically, to individuals who possess critical sensibilities in circumstances in which those individuals are too frightened or overwhelmed to act?

Adorno unfolds an extraordinarily pessmistic analysis in response to this question, focussing on the strain placed on an ego whose reality testing abilities enable it to discover both the potential for and the isolation and impotence of the individual to bring such a transformation about. Adorno argues - and I won’t elaborate on his analysis here - that much of what Freud took to be innate psychological structure derives, instead, from the violence of socialisation into such a context, from the scars inflicted by the ego on itself when, confronted with its own powerlessness, it responds by repressing conscious awareness of potentials for transformation, and driving emancipatory impulses into the unconscious realm.

Adorno suggests that several consequences follow from this form of socialisation:

1. a brittleness and attenuation of the ego, which renders it easier for the ego itself to be overwhelmed by infantile and irrational impulses; the presence of unusually strong barriers separating the unconscious from other dimensions of psychic life, which has the effect of “freezing” the unconscious in an infantile state and undermining the ability to sublimate infantile desires

2. because on some level the awareness of transformative potentials persists - an unconscious reservoir of rage at the unnecessary sacrifices imposed by an unjust society.

All of these things, Adorno suggests, encourage susceptibility to forms of mass mobilisation that are directed specifically against the realisation of potentials for transformation, and that tap into impulses to destroy others (particularly members of vulnerable minorities whose social exclusion can be misrecognised as unmerited freedom from hated social constraints) as well as desires for self-destruction.
Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” - particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute.
While fuelled in some sense by an experience of transformative potentials, these destructive desires are not, within Adorno’s framework, masks for utopian longing, but blind rage and pain at sacrifices unjustly imposed - a rage and pain that, can sometimes try to “rationalise” its own sacrifices through the destructive imposition of equivalent sacrifices on others. Rough Theory concludes:

In reality, I’m actually quite critical of this dimension of Adorno’s work. Specifically, Adorno uses this appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, among other things, to account for certain qualitative characteristics of forms of subjectivity that I think can be explained far more easily via sociological analysis. As well, there is a certain element to Adorno’s reworking of Freud that - for all its scathing criticisms - is a bit too literal and loyal… I’m not particularly drawn to the actual contents of his psychological theory - I am, however, drawn to his question –
the question of whether the experience of living in a society that suggests the potential for its own transformation might, under certain historical circumstances, render likely the emergence of abstractly destructive sensibilities. At the same time, I am cautious of elements in LS’s post - of how quickly the interpretation jumps from the claim that manifest fantasies of destruction might have some kind of non-destructive latent content, to the even more contentious claim that the specific latent content might be utopian in character.

More to come......


image - David Maisel

apocalyptic sublimity [I]

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

As many people have been murmuring over the past month, the film Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s book,The Road (still reading) have struck a major cord in the psyche. Regarding the film, I still find myself lingering over various images a month after viewing it. The 'illegal' immigrant zones seem to have the most staying power for me– the most horror – the most real, as they look to be facsimiles of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the lesser known – Corrections Corp. of America. The film is tragic and beautiful and violent. It also looks like a very familiar ‘future’. The final battle scene seems to put you directly in Fallujah or what Sadr City might be like should US troops go in hard against Al Sadr.

Many bloggers over the last few weeks have been thinking about ‘the end’, many spurred on by Children of Men, McCarthy, the Arctic thaw, and the potential for yet another ‘theater’ in the war on terror -which if you haven’t noticed is starting to flare up more and more in Africa.

Alec Soth did some good digging when he brings to light the following from Kurt Anderson and the eternal art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

“Apocalypse is on our minds,” Kurt Anderson wrote in New York Magazine, “Apocalypse is … hot…. Apocalypticism has ebbed and flowed for thousands of years, and the present uptick is the third during my lifetime…but this time, it seems, more widespread and cross-cultural, both more reasonable (climate change, nuclear proliferation) and more insane (religious prophecy), more unnerving.

Peter Schjeldahl made similar observations in his 1978 essay, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Terror, Narcissism, and Art:

The present widespread disarray and morbidity of the arts in Western civilization represent, it occurs to me, a long-term toxic effect of the atom-bomb terror of the last three decades…Most insidious of the terror’s by-products is what I’ll call the no-future effect. Conditioned to living on the eve of doomsday, we have lost the ability to conceive of a future stretching farther than our own most distant personal goals or responsibilities.

Schjeldahl goes on to explain how this has changed the role of the contemporary artist:

The personality type of our time is the narcissist. Obsessively self-regarding, self-referential, self-consuming, the narcissistic personality finds authenticity only in the moment-to-moment convincingness of bodily sensations and mental events. The narcissistic artist or poet offers to a shadowy public evidence of the dramatizations of these sensations, inviting that public to join in the self-contemplation. Anger, at world or self, alternates with a husky or antic seductiveness, a siren song of love and death or sexy fun, and with abject complaining, the cries of the abandoned baby within.

Good stuff from nearly 30 years ago! Now I have had the privilege of a painting critique with Mr. Schjeldahl not so long ago when he quipped something along these lines.

These are dangerous times. Some people are flocking to church and the rest are buying art!

An astute observation when you compare and contrast the $billion booms of international art fairs (and museums in China) and the swelling of Evangelical mega-churches and the international conversion growth within Islam, Mormonism and Scientology.

Over in the more cerebral corners of the blogosphere, an intense discussion has been volleyed between Poetix, K-Punk and Jodi Dean regarding the 'new' apocalypticism. It began with the post from Jodi thinking on patterns of dissolution.

Time, Entropy, and the Dissolution of the World

More on the pattern: the lack of distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and lies; the encroaching ecological disaster; the way that the US is giving up on democracy and people stay isolated in their homes; the lies about Iraq (Bush says that the deaths there are exaggerated by the insurgents' sophisticated media operation and those who hate America); the horror of Darfur that persists and persists and persists...

Two ideas:
1. physicists can't explain why time runs in one direction.
2. entropy, stuff tends toward disintegration or dissolution

Conclusion from the details and the two theories: what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory?
I think that I need the first point in order to account for the persistence that is in the process of fading and dissolving. So we persist, but the distinctions are fading, and with it, the people we have been, the lives we have led. At any rate, the incompleteness of the theory, its failures, also indicate that it's right (in the grand tradition of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the disproof is the greatest proof): the failures indicate the process of dissolution in which we are caught. Clarity is lost, impossible now that the world has ended and we are but drifting components of its dwindling memory

Poetix responds to this proposition with some very clear assertions:

No Future, Except…

Socialism or Barbarism: the slogan presents itself as if it were describing a moment of decision, a fork in the road. The decision cannot be deferred any longer, the slogan insists: it must be taken immediately. But nothing seems easier to believe than that there is now no choice: barbarism is what is, to an already frightening and intensifying degree, and it is even more what is to come. We have gone too far down that road, impelled along it by all that seems most intransigent, most unalterable, about our “nature” or our “condition”. Once it seems that the moment has passed when things might have turned out otherwise, does not the slogan lose its cogency? ...
The conventional form of the urgent call to action, in the face of some existential menace, is “no future, unless…”. Unless we reduce our emissions, eradicate global poverty and disease (good liberal conscience version); unless we do something about the massing barbarian hordes (bad hysterical racist version). But at least one plausible model of climate change asserts that all the emissions needed to change the climate irrevocably have already been emitted, and the effects of this change are even now ineluctibly unfolding: we pass from tipping-point to tipping-point. HIV/AIDS has already killed millions across the world, making orphans of millions more. None of this can be undone, and there is no possible future world unmarked by these catastrophes. The future designated by the “unless”, the future hoped for by the Western environmentalists and NGO workers of the 80s and 90s, cannot now come to pass. It “has already ended, and we are persisting in its degrading memory” - how many of the narcissistic disorders of our culture can be attributed to this awareness?

He concludes:

We should acknowledge that our world is doomed, that it has no future; but also that it is not the only possible world, that other worlds have been and will be.

K-Punk disagrees and takes a further turn of pessismism with some intriquing thoughts on the role capitalism plays in our inability to imagine to diffirent worlds.

The Damage is Done

If it is increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, that is because the world has already ended. In this condition of mors ontologica, the world goes on, but nothing new can ever happen; what remains is a mechanical permutation through options that have already been fixed…The time to act was in the past; the damage is done; all we can do is await consequences which can no longer be averted...

K-punk then quotes Poetix regarding climate change and concludes:

It's worth pausing here to reflect that, in the debates over climate change, it is no longer the apocalyptic potential of current trends that is disputed; what is doubted is whether any effective action could be taken to deal with it. Questioned about whether they will give up flying in order to combat climate change, people will often respond that there is no point, because others will continue to fly: thus runs the fatalism of capitalist realism. If Dominic is correct, of course, then they are not fatalistic enough.

Jodi Dean sums up and with the following:

First, I agree with Dominic on "other worlds." It is precisely because other worlds have been that there remains a glimmer of hope for other worlds to come. The traces of past hopes remain. At one point somewhere Zizek mentions that our political duty today is to keep these past traces alive, to recall past aspirations. Perhaps a way to say this is that ghosts matter and that as we linger in a world that has already ended keeping these ghosts alive is the only thing we must do. Or, we are responsible to the lacks in our ended world.

Second, I am taken by Dominic and K-Punk's emphasis on the pointlessness of action insofar as it is already irrelevant. This makes me think of Children of Men and the continuation of struggle even at the end of the world. Maybe, contra Zizek, simply persisting as dead, simply preferring not to act and remaining/becoming an obstacle, is actually not enough. Isn't it the case that once we recognize that we are choosing the worst, that we are not grounding our acts perversely in the service of a future history, that we are precisely then actually free? Differently put, perhaps only irrelevant action is free. (Of course, we need to be clearer about relevant to what--the operative notion here is relevant to a future; but, it may be that in a world already ended, the notion of relevance changes completely such that we have to think of it in terms of relevance to a past, to ghosts, and to lacks.)

Third, at one point K-punk writes:

Oddly, apocalyptic dread - so omnipresent during the Cold War - seems to have been extirpated from the popular unconscious….So, it seems to me that apocalyptic dread is alive.

But what does this mean? If apocalypticism is present, does that mean that the world hasn't already ended? I don't think so. Here's why: pentecostals and evangelicals are waiting for the Rapture. That they haven't been raptured means, for them, that the world hasn't ended. But, if one doesn't expect a Rapture, then it's easy to recognize that these poor souls are persisting in a delusion so as to avoid facing up to the brutal reality of an ended world. Apocalypto imagines past apocalypse--not future. And, Children of Men imagines present apocalypse…. I came away overwhelmed by a cliche (which says nothing about the movie per se, in other words, don't blame the movie)--if Guantanamo is in the world, then all the world is Guantanamo. Although this is a cliche, it may apply more than we think…. the 'solution' of containment zones for troublemakers just seems obvious.

Had enough? ......more tomorrow

image: Emmit Gowan