All this buttoning and unbuttoning: fun against fun

In the old order of the 1950s we were all repressed and that was good; it meant society would be stable. People couldn't enjoy the physical experience of life, sex, and pleasure because we had been trained to repress our desires and not to express them. This goes back to Freud.  He believed that inside of man were powerful unconscious, violent and sexual urges that if we didn't control, we would tear each other to pieces, but not before raping each other. Then Wilhelm Reich came along and said the opposite; he thought, if we don't express our primal sexual urges, then they will drive us crazy and then we will all tear each other to pieces, but not before raping each other.  This latter idea, Reich's idea of the libidinal ego, forms the foundation of the 1960s counter-culture, particularly in California; essentially that unconscious desires must find expression, and that our bodies, and one's individual experience, one's pleasure, might provide solutions that old politics were not producing, the revolution people wanted.  Herbert Marcuse at UC San Diego said if enough people pursued non-traditional relationships, homosexuality, whatever, just not the mom-dad-kids patriarchy, it might cause a social transformation.  In a similar vein, Norman O. Brown at UC Santa Cruz championed the idea of the "polymorphous perversity", sources of sexual pleasure not directly related to sex organs, or at least to the biological sexual function of our species.  Politics was refocused upon our bodies.  We would be find pleasure in the weird, and it would change the world.  

Fast forward 40 years, and this is our ideology, and in places like West Marin, our religion.  We are all focused on our emotional lives, the struggle to be our "authentic selves", self-expression, and our sex lives -- a trance of pseudo-Buddhist detachment from reality and spiritualized hedonism.  And it is a terrible trap.  For a few reasons -- one, it doesn't know what to do with concentrations of power, like the corporations which control the economy; as other authors on Local.org point out: our belief in our individuality and separation from the whole, and its deliberate indifference to concentrated power, is the "scafolding that supports Empire" itself.  Two, it disregards politics, the weak uniting to negotiate with the powerful, because the process of organizing politically means the individual is no longer the center.  And alone in nature, we all think about the terrible things going on in the world, but don't think we can do anything about them.  Finally, it is a totally regulated and conformist ideology, in which pleasure becomes an order, i.e. "you must enjoy."  The liberty of experience, of sexual experience for instance, with liberty its essential quality, is forfeited -- people regulate and obsess over all aspects of sex; in relationships, people act as though they were each other's sex therapists trying to do the right thing for each other's sexual health and satisfaction; sex becomes a grim sacrifice, similar to the sex of the 1950s that we rebelled against. And more, people do outdoorsy adventuring because they feel they need to do it. We get anxious if we can't conform to "the dude let's go rock climbing" command we all apparently have to obey now.  We shameless suit our aging bodies in Lycra outfits, patronize coffee shops, and discuss our stamina.  More importantly, to not be focused on pleasure, our ecstatic aerobic selves, would be a betrayal of one's being; it would be dehumanizing. 

And this is why we are so maniacal and unhappy. Our "I wanna have fun!" answer to everything treats other people as instruments of our own pleasure and emotional fulfillment. The humans that our eye pans across exist to play a role, two dimensional place-holders for humans, and if the 2D people come off the page, when they leave our script for them, we are forced, sadly, to replace them with new actors. Worst of all, this new ethos described, makes me sound like the Pope, an instrument of social control. We are confronting, ascendant, invincible banality.  But if you say today that we have inverted and created a more extreme form of the social control of the 1950s, you are considered to be the enemy of freedom.  

But does fossil fuel know it's the problem?

We know that fossil fuels are poisonous, that they cause myriad social and environmental crises.  Why then are we unable to stop using them?  Our inability to deal with the problem of fuel invites a perverse question: does fossil fuel know that we don’t need it?  This is a version of a joke told by Slavoj Zizek (regarding belief and commodity fetishism):  briefly, a man believes that he is a piece of grain; he goes to a psychologist and he is cured of this delusion.  Time passes, and he returns to the analyst and tells him, “There is a chicken outside of my house; I am afraid he will eat me.”  The analyst says, “But you are cured of your delusion; you know that you are a man, not a piece of grain.”  The man replies, “Yes, I know.  But does the chicken know?”  This joke helps us to understand how we could know that fuel is causing catastrophe, but because our survival is wholly dependent upon fuel, we could contain the contradiction; we could hold the two separate.  This was the way in which Zizek hopes to explain our relationship to money and commodities, and the same insight, that in spite of our ability to describe the commodity and its effect upon our lives, our enacted belief is in those commodities and relationships – our paradoxical affirmation of what we claim to deny – can help us understand what fossil fuels mean. 

The control of heat is a much more primal force than money (though for our empire they have become inseparable – what would happen if global oil transactions ceased to be conducted using US dollars?)  Heat is necessary in an absolute sense, and with the advent of modern fuel based technology, our relationship of dependency has become one of total humiliation.  This is a deep human humiliation under the strain of which we have uncoupled cause and effect, history and politics.  What is the power of a man and his thoughts in comparison to an airplane, or more to the point, what is the meaning of a “community” which is entirely dependent upon imported sources of fuel for all of its survival needs (for food, transportation, heat, etc.)?  We have internalized this craven dependency; it operates unconsciously even for those people who are consciously aware of climate change for instance, or the fact that their commute is ruining their marriage, etc.  In this reduction of ourselves, what remains held in common are sentimental images of human interaction, and similarly man in this humiliated state, with labor, now wholly machine and fuel, just the idyll of labor, is left only with romantic and sentimental relationships with other individuals.  This is the world of your town Christmas party and the play-date trips with your wife.    

Commonly our relationship to fossil fuels is called an addiction.  When we observe a drug addict or drunk doing the same thing to themselves that we all do with fuel, we alternate between hatred and pity of their apparent madness – ultimately their desire through addiction to transcend unto death.  Unlike fuel which is unconsciously accepted as beyond our control, the traditional addict abandons what control we are assumed to have; the addict intrudes upon our sentimental selves – our last pathetic gesture toward virtue.  Their rejection of control is our proof of their madness.  But as we have walled off the reality of our dependency on fossil fuels from our sentimentality, that which remains of our idea of humanity, we cannot recognize or even describe our true belief in fuel’s transcendent power. 

We have to replace combustion of fossil fuels for the generation of heat and power in almost every role in which they currently function.  Through politics and the reinvention of our infrastructure, we can resolve the joke – we can let the chicken know that we are men not kernels of grain.  The very act of this replacement of fuels is the process by which we will mature beyond pale sentimentality toward actual virtue and community.   

I'll be coming for you...

Contained within the architecture of modern transportation networks are the plans of mass dislocation.  So while the driver, or commercial air passenger, feel they are given freedom, they are actually accepting the ease and facility of their dislocation.  Their mobility robs them of a fixed position, a locality.  As the global economy, a grandiose fantasy, collapsed, there was a spirit, promoted by business media, that we should or would have "six jobs in our lifetime."  When the crash happened perversely hopeful NPR radio essays told us of "permanent 'temps' who travel the nation" -- temporary job to temporary job.  A punishment from antiquity: for those men who wished of traveling freely over the face of the earth, to know the world, they have traded the ability to know their home.  

If Friedrich Kittler is correct, and Marshall McLuhan's idea of media as extension of self is a dangerously unexamined question (i.e. what is self?), that technology in fact imprints "self" (down to the very use of the word "imprint" as this word is not written but burnt onto silicon), that we are not in control as we imagine, that the technology defines us, then we can have our sanity, but we live in a terrifying world filled with endless vectors, real and not yet identified threats.  If McLuhan's argument is correct, then we are all insane, but the illusions and spectacles that are generated by our society can relieve us, however temporarily, of fear.  Said another way, technology is not a tool we pick up and use at our will, a separate entity that we take up and put down, but the lens through which we perceive what is real. The pair of glasses is not just an object, it is your vision.    

There is a false dilemma as well between a humanist, "we tell the machines what to do" and a supposedly anti-humanist view "the machines tell us what to do."  The truth is that we tell the machines what to tell us to do.  What if we change our infrastructure to limit the dislocation of population?  And what of globalization and its parallel fuel transportation system?  Put not in a reactive, but a radical way, if we build infrastructure and machines that by its nature, imparted by humans, privilege the local, what of that?  

In a sense, the 20th century was about connecting the whole globe, and this great technological feat permeated the entire culture of the west.  The New Age mantra, "We're all connected, man..."  was really hippies connecting with the spirit of President Eisenhower and the interstate highway system.  And while it is true that we are all connected, the appropriate response, to transportation infrastructure and cloying hippie bullshit, is "Oh no! We're all connected!"