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.  

Groovies in motion and at rest

These two posts were originally read on Local.org Radio Blog on KWMR  (http://kwmr.org/show/281) and are reflections upon the American Groovy, a privately educated Imperial Idiot coming in many varieties. The most refined and exalted of those is, no doubt, the Bay Area Groovy. I note in passing that a rare subspecies, the West Marin Groovy, is unsurpassed in pure copper-bottomed groovitude.   

Groovies in motion...

For those wealthy Americans with an empathetic concern for Africa – usually highly romantic in their conception of history and purpose – there is charity adventure travel: Stanford grads spending two weeks at a time studying the Meerkats of Africa or setting up solar panels in Kenyan villages before returning home to post photos documenting their exotic humanity sans frontières to the websites containing their internet identities, their post-ideological public selves. Aside from the natural wincing their 'Orientalism with a human face' causes me, what is wrong with African charity? So what, one solar panel more is a worthy thing (and even I admit that Meerkats are cute). 

Take these two statistics: the West gives 50-80 billion dollars in charitable aid to Africa every year, and in the opposite direction 500-800 billion dollars of African wealth is transferred by African businesses and government officials to off-shore Western banks, every year. Essentially, for every one dollar we give in charity, the West takes ten.  And that process of capital being dislocated and then reconcentrated in the West is just part of the massive transfer of wealth from Africa that is constantly occurring.  

I met a professor who raises money for libraries in villages in sub-Saharan Africa.  He told me that it was wrong to discourage or defame charitable giving, that what it helped regardless of the larger context of globalization.  This is the essence of the post-ideological, post-historical mindset – he is saying that we can operate independent of reality, because reality is beyond our control. Regardless of the hypocrisy of American's offering advice on primary education, I think he was wrong to exclude the context – along the lines of Oscar Wilde's criticism of charity:

 ...it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they [the givers of charity] very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right.

... and at rest

I am conflicted over the present obsession with the sensual enjoyment of food.  I do prefer good food, the quality of flavor and production (organic, non-GMO, etc.), but those who focus upon the consumption of this food – whose price is indicative not only of the cost of production, but the market it serves as well – indulge in this sensual experience because they are simultaneously wealthy and convinced that they have no power to change the world.  They seek pleasure out of unconscious despair. They are perfectly adjusted to the deep cynicism of our age. In this, the lovers of great and expensive cheese are deeply contemptible and to be treated as fools, the traditionalists of no tradition.  

The industrial world has existed barely 150 years. The dislocation of the population from farm to city undermined the mores and traditions of these new industrial men and women. The dynamics of community, family, love, politics and labor were in a state of radical flux. It gave rise to many of the political ideals we still hold.  But because of the attendant uncertainty of this new city life, the figure of the liar and dissembler found a boundless new stage on which to perform, while the standards for the criticism of their arts disappeared.  A butcher sells rotten meat; the old enforcer, the collective judgment of the village – voodoo death to the transgressor – is gone; in its place the police, the anonymous men from another neighborhood, are open to bribery. And this new level of cynicism and mistrust in the society gave rise to a reaction – political movements who sought to use government to reestablish village law. 

But the problem of centralization gave the world an irresistible indifference to justice, and as the peasants and laborers attempted to reassert the law, the Second World War began.  In the wake of this catastrophe, touching nationalism, fascism and communism – all political ideals, all conceptions of justice, were lost to cynicism, sometimes called realism; while born of centralization and industrial empire, it embedded itself squarely in the mind of the individual.  Cynicism is the parasite that came to control its host – Western man. 

Our terror at the consequences of political ideas was institutionalized; it is built into the dominant post-war economic philosophies – man as a lone selfish actor strategizing against all other men for survival.  This, bolstered by the pop gene theory of later day social Darwinians, is the present consensus view of man.  For my generation, say everyone from 20-40 years old, this has been wholly internalized, the history lost.  So we now take for granted that politics are irrelevant and the economy is unchangeable.  If we are rich, we focus on what we are unconsciously certain is the last meaningful realm of human activity, pleasure.  Pass the cheese.  

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!"   

Obsolescence and Freedom

General Motors came upon an idea, planned obsolescence, the origin of which I do not know. GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan championed the notion of building marvelously powerful but intentionally deficient machines: that they would be essential, transformative in their power, yet fail--and have to be immediately replaced (his contemporary's creation Screwtape may have indicated his method). They would transform reality. The act of operating them would be efficacious but not clearly understood or acknowledged (academics would study the suburbs), but above all, the articulated emotion, the articulate unmeaning of the technology, the intoxicating simulation of liberty would be treated as the rational purpose of the technology. How can you sell an object over and over again? How can you sell a person a solution that never quite meets the question it proposes loudly to answer? How can we monetize the damnation of Tantalus and Sisyphus? Could their fate become an lifestyle that we accept and inhabit? 

My neighbor grew up on a ranch on which there are tools that provide utility many generations after their manufacture and purchase. This, like their land now valued beyond the means of all but the extremely rich to buy, is accumulation of generations. It is the essence of civilization--that which is saved, that which increases through saving, selection, that which is admired for its ability to sustain. Those things that sustain us, civilization--the accumulation of utility--are through planned obsolescence systematically destroyed in order to supply them again. It is pernicious--it acts upon the psyche; it appeals to Christian and more general religious ideas of renewal--with man's capability of forgiveness, to live again, his bond with every man who shares the experience of life, replaced by a ritual of buying new clothing from JC Penny every Easter. Ultimately the beautiful proposition of the author of the religious text is entirely forgotten and we simply buy new clothes to feel the sensation of power. The desire to be responsible is subverted to deliberate and incontinent disregard for the use of resources; the hatred of future generations. I have been bred, ironically, to despise breeding, specifically the idea of being a biological fact. Houellebecq: Children are existence's cruelest trick--you support them all your life, then they out live you. 

This is my rehash of the ideas of writers like Karl Marx and his descendants like Herbert Marcuse repeated through an education heavily influenced by Christian apologists. The primary idea and apprehension is not religious doctrine: it is that uselessness, trivial desire, effrontery and boredom are the motivation or emotional quality of this forty year moment of our motionless ecstasy in anti-civilization. It is the same apprehension the neo-conservatives; the fear that struck them, the terror they projected upon the terrorist. Their failure is their false or perhaps deliberately fraudulent attribution of responsibility for this destructive learned boredom on "liberal society" which they say must become wanton from freedom and seek to destroy the foundation that allowed or "afforded" them their contempt for the past. How much more likely is this assessment than powerful industries obsessed with the potential crisis of "over supply" of goods, developing and articulating in a deliberate campaign within our culture of insatiable desire fed by planned obsolescence? Is it true that what one necessarily does with freedom is destroy everything in reach? The man unbound from cultural chains immediately bashes his wife's head in for not making him coffee? It is an absurd question to ask--can I be free of culture? Can I lick my own tongue? It is a false question. It assumes, in a negative form, the failure of the neo-cons rejected mentor, Marx--that one could become conscious--rather than what I believe, which is that ideology is consciousness, and that our consciousness is an expression of ideology, that parsing ideologies is essential, not obsessing over their potential escape. The reality is that we are bound by culture, but that we have a real if limited agency to change it. The perverse determinism of the "neo-con's" is the real irrationality. Their necessary unraveling of society with too many freedoms, is flip side lie of Nike shoes, that if you possess this object you will master your enemies. Like planned obsolescence and the idea of marketing and public relations--it is the transference to an object a power or quality that it does not possess. Liberty is not causing the collapse of our society, concentrations of power are playing games with the perceptions of reality available to an atomized society, atoms that will never be molecules, auto-organizing atoms, molecule without combination, without attraction, molecule in one atom ("socialism in one person"), the auto-eros of homunculii like Bill Kristol and Daniel Pipes. They are themselves the disgrace of liberty as power gestures to these new non-men to participate in the manufacture of reality. To lie to automata. The determinism of geneticists progressed on the same lines--"this has to be"; your biology is your enemy; you hate you. To point out that the Greeks had contributed much to the discussion of the fate of those who defy fate is lost perhaps. In all of this, the beauty and awe of human investigation of our perceptions is lost.