Jeremiah Blues 2020+

 How can one make sense of the experience of 2020?  Perhaps the best way is the realization of the no-sense that underlies history.  There is clearly a sense that 2020 will be a crossroad point in history, with change of direction that will lead the path into the future. A convergence of replays of 1918, 1929 and 1968 (and the 1860s) have dislodged our sense of stability and security.

    The initial "historic" event of the year, COVID-19, was beyond what most had experienced in several generations - the inability to "solve" the emerging problem, the uncertainty  (with its certain destructive impact), and the inescapable ubiquity of a true pandemic have undermined our modern society.  The necessity of realizing the breakdown of normality has  caused a psychological trauma within our collective unconscious, the first felt by most outside of "unthinkable" modern spaces like Sarajevo or Syria).  This force has infiltrated and subverted the impregnable defenses of the unshakable first-world. The only way to comprehend the unnegotiability of this event, is to realize it as an intrusion of the Lacanian Real into the "Stable" construct of Symbolic Reality.  Our language, laws, ideology, principles, and even our science, cannot contain it or shield us.
     

As Tony Myers has described the Real, it is:
    "anything that is interpreted differently discloses the presence of the Real. AIDS is a good example of this. Some people interpret it as a punishment for homosexuals, a divine retribution for carrying on a  non-Christian way of life. Others see it as part of a plot by the CIA to stem population growth in Africa, while other people consider it the result of humankind's interference in Nature. All these explanations circle around the same brute fact of the disease which carries on regardless of the reasons attributed to it. In other words, AIDS is an irruption of the Real. It is meaningless in itself and all these interpretations of it are attempts to Symbolize it, attempts, we might say, to divine a message in the Real where none exists. For the Real is meaningless and senseless-it just persists, and meaning can only be found within the reality of the Symbolic Order."

This example of another coronavirus illustrates the trauma of Covid as as an intrusion of the Real.  It's a Chinese plot to destroy Trump.  It's an American plot to destroy China.  It's a global plot to inject microchips into the population. All ways to interpret this brute intrusion.  This event itself would be historic enough in its direct impact on the totality of individuals that constitute global activity.  However, beyond that we must ask: How does history happen?  Do events, (and their resulting cultures, policies, and world-views) occur as we pre-plan and enact them through reasonable and practical considerations? Or do they involve a certain amount of randomness, occurring beyond the precise world that we can carefully control?  Like our own best-laid lives, history "is what happens while we make other plans."

Against the background of a Covid world, the tension was going to inevitable break into violence, and the Real infiltrates not only nature, but society. For those "law and order" advocates that condemned the protests-turned-riots by the criminal undesirables, let us not forget Philadelphia 1985 when police bombed (literally) and burned down a neighborhood, killing 11 people, including five children.   It is interesting to note Jean Baudrillard's work America, in which he discusses the concept of asepsis:

"In Philadelphia, a radical sect named ‘MOVE’, with a bizarre set of rules, including one forbidding      both the practice of autopsy and the removal of rubbish, is cleared out by the police, who kill eleven    people by fire and burn down thirty adjacent houses, including those (the irony of it!) of all the neighbours who had called for the sect to be removed. This, too, is a clean-up operation. They are getting rid of rubbish and patina, getting back to an original state of cleanliness, restoring. ‘Keep America Clean.’"

Of course, now that the radical right has shown definitely that it isn't really about the law, its about control (Fascism), and power defines what the law means.  There is nothing above it (or more fundamental). It was the transition into a new year and new political landscape that finally synthesized social violence and politics. A breakdown of both political and daily social function has shown the intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic systems that found our everyday functioning. Of course, the right-wing propaganda compares the 2020 election to the 2016 one, and the capitol siege to the 2020 riots. 

As for the election, in 2016 the Democrats were accused of refusing to accept legitimate results when they wore pink hats and had peaceful marches.  Far removed from organized (conspiracy) attempts to overthrow the legitimate 2020 results.  No one on the left claimed the Trump did not officially occupy the office of president, only that he was sworn in on a technicality - a deficiency built into the fabric of our system,- and the outcome, however legitimate, was a result of  voter influence by foreign propaganda and political maneuvering (Comey).  The impeachment did NOT exonerate him from these accusations.  He very much did NOT have a mandate.  A professional, honorable person in that position would have been very prudent and should have appealed to the opposite side - the majority- for cooperation.  As for being President by upholding the office through professional action, the four years revealed a failure in this respect, culminating in the capitol siege.

In terms of the violence, the comparisons would be laughable in less serious circumstances. Once again, the left is accused of condoning the riots.  Of course no one in any rational manner, or in any political capacity endorsed, condoned, encourage, incited or promoted such activity.   As criminal activity, it was never labelled as anything but criminal.  Two major differences stand out:

1. It was extra-political, or at the least extra-legal.  While making a political statement and attempting political goals, these events aimed at something outside of the parameters of the functioning governmental process. While groups like BLM are closer in thought to the Democratic party,the are not synonymous, nor was it was a Democratic sanctioned issue.  No one did in the name of Democrats and no one sported shirts or flags and acted in the name of an individual.  Furthermore, the protestors have a legitimate cause. The problem is that the justice required for the solution is not to be found with the justice system nor the political process.  Without recourse to an established system, only no-legal means might remain, hence an extra-political situation.  As such, the manifestation of frustration and anger may be illegal, but whether it is unethical remains in question. Certain from inside the system it appears so.  But, as already revealed the system is incomplete and any progress to an equitable system may necessitate criminal behavior.  When criminal behavior is enacted for a purpose, it is up to the individual to commit to responsibility for it.  They must consider the repercussions and be prepared to face them.  If they find that justice will be further advanced, then the ethical decision is for them to make. For example, freeing a slave pre-Civil War was clearly criminal. Nevertheless it was the correct action.  While the circumstances are not currently as clear-cut as that, it may be proven in the future that discrimination in civil rights requires revolution outside of the system. Reflecting on the serious of rioting, let's not forget that some rioting is quickly overlooked (and it's a bit of an American tradition).  Burning garbage cans, overturned cars, and broken windows are not unheard of results of sporting events, and have no inherent value at all.  But, these crimes are dismissed as nothing (but crimes). So, to claim that the 2020 riots were downplayed in respect to 2021 is disingenuous at best.

 However, what just happened was not equivocal, it is distinct level  , and direct comparisons area category mistake.

 2. The siege was Anti-American. A far larger difference between the two events involves the political overlap.The siege was not just criminal, it was a higher level of violation: treason.  In attempting to overturn the election and destroy the legal process, it attempted to negate the very laws of the land.  In this itself, this event has no relation to the riots. But, far worse, is that this insurgency is led by the Comander-in-Chief himself.  Not since Emperor Palpatine have I heard of a leader controlling two forces pitted against each other.  With some Senator and Representative already complicit in treason with the President, the insurgency is both internal and external to the established government and unequivocal to criminal riots. 

Before the Capitol siege, the State Capitol takeovers by Militias in the summer were already well beyond protests. If you attend a protest armed- that is terrorism, plain and simple.  Even worse if do it on government property.  As a way of influence politics through fear and intimidation, brandishing weapons is terrorism.

What we are dealing with is not just differences of policy, and beyond differences with ideology.  It is meta-ideology.[1] A deeper ideology which has co-opted, corrupted, and radicalized the conservative ideology.  The growing cult (influenced by QAnon) has expanded to redefine the Deep State as to include The media, academia, the FBI-CIA-intelligence agencies, the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, Fox News, Big Tech, Walmart, the cabinet, and VP Mike Pence. Every thing and everyone the defends the Constitution becomes a target, an enemy of the state.  America as a state is now the enemy of the "patriots." The coup of the Republican party is evident in the RINO accusations, when solid conservatives are condemned as not real Republicans.  The is absurd and obviously backwards.  That split is apparent only because the party was commandeered by a far more conservative and radical ideology.  A more authentic party, clear in its ambitions and presentation would be honest in its alternative to the Republicans, something like "The America First Party", "or the American Fascist Party." As a far-right party, the choice would be clear for voters.  Instead, we have political action on false pretenses, a cult unlike any previous party - stores of propaganda merchandise, shirts and flags with an Messianic icon. It is a Twenty-first century update of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, patterned on the Book of Revelation.  It is more than a political movement, it the foundations of a religion, a very false and dangerous one. "Draining the swamp" means destroying a democratic society and leaving an omnipresent swamp of corrupt oligarchy. Fighting the Deep State means ignoring, violating and overriding the US Constitution.

Ultimately, the Republican party was the Frankenstein that built the monster of Trump. And, Trump is the Frankenstein that built the monster of his cult. It is all out of their control.  And, the spreading danger it possesses needs to be eradicated before it consumes American democracy. Covid was not the only virus to mass spread in 2020, and we are now living in the Real, hoping for a Symbolic reconstruction to normalize history.

Addendum: I just noticed that the last post I made, High Rise, involves the fracture of the Symbolic social order into the Real. Although written by April, I was reading it at the end of 2019.  I guess 2020 was doomed to be the coming storm.

[1] Not only is it an ideology - a viewpoint considered universally true and foundational (when it is contingent and arbitrary), but one that resides secretly underneath an ideology- creating a double falsity.

High Rise

High Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975)

It has been suggested that J.G. Ballard was beyond psychological help. High Rise is an example of this reaction, a story of conditions that spiral out of control into some colossal external force which creates situations that no rational person would ever consider possible.

In terms of the film: The first thought I had while reading the book, was how interesting this story would be in terms of 21st century consumer technology, with our constant surroundings of multiple screens which present new challenges in interpersonal interaction. Given the emphasis on batteries to power the first generation of portable devices - tape recorders, cameras, etc- in the absence of functional municipal power, and the alluded transformation into cybernetic lifeforms (bio-robots), the current human state of always-wired-wirelessly only enhances Ballards original thought.  Therefore, I was quite disappointed that the film chose to keep the setting in the 1970s. Not only is the entire 1970s aesthetic something we don't ever need to revisit, the 70s view of excess and tuned-out reality, exemplified in orgiastic sex events, detracts from the core story in my view. Conversely  there is an opposition to the free-love counterculture with A Clockwork Orange feel and its 70s appreciation for violent anarchy and rejection of the system.  Additionally, although Ballard's writing contained a strong surrealist vision, this is cinematically presented in a psychedelic approach which makes the film overly strange and hard to follow. I'm not sure what someone who had not read the book would think of the film, although looking at Amazon reviews it seems pretty clear. The film simply doesn't present the story clearly. Unsurprisingly, it simplifies the story, but it also reduces the horrific elements to a tamer, more acceptable representation. As the novel reaches its most intense point, Laing cannot even descend the building because of the stench of a pool filled with rotting corpses, (reduced in the film to a far less graphic scene showing the few causalities being laid to rest in the pool.) In the novel, this scene is extremely unsettling and jarring as its shows a local holocaust which occurred without a rational explanation and, even worse, not at the hands of external tyrannical forces, but only by the participant residents themselves.

What I find significant about High Rise, is its relevance to the current state of the world. As a story of the fragile nature of the social construct which can completely unravel from small disruptions, there is something to learn for now. This social de-evolution, to a state that is completely unthinkable does actually occur. In recent memory it has happened in Syria and Sarajevo, and the modern first-world currently hangs on the edge of sliding down such a steep precipice. The most prominent question that arises asks: why don't the residents simply leave? But history shows again and again people gripping onto their section of the world even as it erupts into total chaos, as they grip tighter in spite of this, possessing what is "their" even as it turns to rubbish. There is a Luciferian notion that it is better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven - that outside civilization which is maintained by someone else. After being immersed in dysfunctionality, Wilder finds time away from the building "dreamlike in its unreality" and eventually Laing cannot even force himself to leave. Like a lobster being boiled, each event which worsens conditions is not recognized to be part of an on-going chain with extreme results. Perhaps people are ultimately too optimistic. How can the world be progressing along, and all of a sudden we are living inside a nightmare that no one chose to stop before it started (as happened so many times in the twentieth century).  This is an exploration of that phenomena.

The additional political messages inserted in the film seem to only over-emphasize the theme, which is already overly presented and all too clear in the novel- as the building, with is numerical hierarchy of residents, is an obvious metaphor of class systems. But, this seems overly idealized in the film with Wilder's low class (level) flat displaying a Che Guevara poster and the closing Margaret Thatcher quote. This quote: "There is only one economic system in the world, and that is capitalism." is interesting in itself in that it completely embodies ideology. If it is taken to mean that Capitalism is the only possible system, in an end of history view, than it is total ideology without any objective value or meaning, as it dismisses any alternative possibilities. Conversely, if it is taken to mean that all economics are capitalistic in nature, then it turns the two terms into synonyms and strips away any meaningful distinction of capitalism. I don't find the story a compelling challenge to capitalism, although it makes strong statements about consumerism.  Rather it concerns a more fundamental layer of human nature, the initial ideological conditions before they are systematized into economic structures.  What is most interesting is Royal's response to the complete breakdown of his utopia, as he embraces this breakdown rather than attempting to fix it, a position that Laing also embraces and continues.  So the resulting message becomes maybe everything needs to be destroyed before it can be rebuilt, but the dangers of nihilism are a serious threat without meaningful response that is left unconsidered in the work.

The film is disappointing not because it's bad, in fact it is unique enough to leave a strong impression,  but because it could have been so much better. There were so many things that could have been done different to explain the story, while at the same time not explicitly hitting the viewer over the head.  So many interesting scenes I was waiting for ultimately never occurred, instead being replaced by some 1970s acid induced psychedelic trip or watered down, destroying the effect.  However, in both version, the story leaves a chilling, disconcerting afterimage.

As Ballard's characters "surrender to a logic more powerful than reason," the underlying proximity of the Real becomes apparent.  Safe within the stable realms of our Symbolic world, we can function on a level far evolved from barbaric savagery.  But, really, this stability is an illusion, we are only existing on a fragile coating of a surface suspending us out of the Real.  A simple crack in this layer can easily disintegrate the chain of meaning that sustains society.  Reason can only manifested through Symbolic mechanisms, but the more fundamental conditions of the Real always persist within us.  And as the more fundamental level of existence, it contains its own logic, not as articulate-able propositions, but as forces.  Recent shifts of political thought have shown this fragility, as pressure exerted from the narrow, but vocal, political movements which have caused further forceful  ideological balkanization, pushing us all deeper into factions built on our own adopted Symbolic systems.  The field has been set for final disintegration, with each person ready to take up arms for their own banner.  While the full potentiality of this political disintegration is only now becoming clear, Ballard seemed well aware of the unsustainability of civilized modernity back in 1975, once again showing tremendous foresight.

Postmodern Picard

With what sounded like a miracle, it was announced that we would finally be able to continue exploring the world of the 24th Century with the return of Jean Luc Picard.  The release of Picard itself, however, has driven a fissure through the world of Trek fans.  Both in terms of its structure and its 24th century content, it is far removed from the last time we viewed the Next Generation Era.   Trek has always reflected the real-world conditions of its time.  1960s Star Trek dealt with themes of gender and races analogous to the cultural transformations of that decade, along with directly mimicking its styles.  The situations of The Next Generation, along with the concurrent TOS films, reflected a world anchored in the outlook of 1990, environmentalism, gender orientation, economic disparity, all at the approaching end of the millennium when it seemed that society might finally make progress into a more stabilized form. Within this evolution, the end of the Cold War was perhaps a decisive element.  The stand-off between the Super-powers of the galaxy  that drove the politics of TOS was now in a dynamic shift.  The sudden crumbling of the Klingon Empire reflected the end of the Soviet Union, and while Picard existed in a post-Klingon universe, Kirk had to directly, personally deal with the transformation.  Now that we have returned to the Federation, 20+ years after Next Generation, these underlying dynamics have shifted the stable foundations of the world.  Many Trek fans are disturbed by the less-than-optimistic view that is at odds with the established Roddenberry universe.  It must be remembered that as Trek has reflected points in the later 20th Century, the newest 21st Century continuation must also reflect where we are at.  Much has change (not for the better) since we last saw Picard aboard the Enterprise.  We have had to endure the aftermath of 9/11 (which undermined the post-Cold war optimism we briefly encountered), followed by economic collapse and the disintegration of political stability.  The criticism that the Federation at the dawn of the 25th century does not hold the same ideals as the Federation we have known is missing the point.  Political entities do not remain static, and all such entities will undergo periods of crisis and de-evolution.  Returning to a Federation with a 1990 viewpoint would not posses the depth that we would ultimately expect from the world of Trek.  Along with the Klingons, the Cardassians, Romulans, and, ostensibly, the Borg has left the Federation as the sole super-power of the quadrant.  Without political challengers, and no one to answer to, the Federation is adrift in its own power.  Where one could rationally suppose a unified utopia could be finally achieved, as history has shown, entities define themselves in terms of the other.  Without peer-adversaries, one has to look for scapegoats to account for inadequacies.  The idea of a corrupt Starfleet is not a new idea at all.  Several Next Generation and Deep Space Nine stories were concerned with such a contingency (And were able to simply overcome the problem within one or two episodes, never to be concerning again).  Furthermore, the notion of a lees-than-equal class of non Starfleet citizens was always a nagging concealment.  There has been a long standing argument that the Federation is a Starfleet- controlled military dictatorship, with civilian life a more austere existence than the Socialist utopia it purports to be.

What Picard displays is the non-Starfleet life that is flourishing in a less restrictive environment.  It is a world with experience life on the surface, rather than anchored to a stable foundation of principle and goal.  Places like Freecloud are emerging, embracing the expansion of personal freedom, all entwined within economic relations.  The connected world of the Federation, presumably much more able than our own internet-connected world, had been previously shown to be a no-nonsense, utilitarian transfer of information.  Now, the fringes of commercial society can release their own vision.   Rather than simple browser pop-ups, orbiting such commercially free planets enables frivolous full 3D holographic pop-ups.  The everyday tech of the Federation has taken extraordinary leaps in 30 years (like our own).  The new instant walk-through street transporters are stunning compared to the limitations negotiated in TOS, forcing a inquiry of how they might work - how does the system know where you're going (assuming that they are not, inefficiently,  simple single-destination systems).  If there is an answer to that, I predict it will be: there's an app for that!  Now that all digital display screens (and controls) have become holographic projections, it seems plausible that everyone carries around the credit-card size digital device that replaces phones, tablets and computers.  Pre-selecting you destination before walking into the nearest transporter might be the most convenient method.  With this new level of tech, residents of the 25th century live with a slick, glowing augmented reality, far removed from a more grounded, organic existence.

As for the form of the show, many will ask: why can't we have stand-alone episodes.  Conversely, I have, for a while now, asked what if Next Generation had been able to be constructed as a long arc, it could have been epic.  The 40 minute episode didn't really have a beginning, middle, end,  structure.  There was a build-up of the problem-at-hand, and a resolution with less than a minute to go.  There wasn't much of and end, just a stop to the episode.  A good portion of the series felt like discrete points, without much continuity other than involving the same characters.  So, count me as one who does not miss the stand-alone episodes.  There is some difficulty in finding a position between vastly separated episodes,  and fragments of one story. I think this an area that the Mandalorian could have handled better, as it feels like a bunch of separate tales trying to be one unified story.  If there is a let-down to the form of Picard, it is that, even as a season-arc, the end comes with a few minutes to go, without addressing the major crisis at hand.  After millennia of preparing to eradicate galactic life, some extremely  powerful entity is quickly thwarted, and no one gives it a further thought. In very non-Starfleet thinking, no one attempts to question who this race is, what they might really be about, or how to avert their potential threats in the future.  Furthermore, the appearance of hundreds of Starfleet vessels, of the latest class, and in nearly instant time, is pure fanboy ridiculousness. Where previous crisis situations required the attention of the ONLY, incomplete, vessel with the region, now entire advanced fleets are ready on a moments notice to intervene on non-Starfleet missions.  The video-game fell ruins the internal logic that the Star Trek world is built upon.  But, if this series is still finding its way, like its progenitors, the future of Star Trek looks ready to continue the quality reflection of our own world, 55 years on.

Mazes and Zones: Part 1

While the vast majority of the discussion of post-modern television has focused on its stylistic formulation and structure (non-linear narrative, intertextuality, pastiche, etc), it has largely ignored the substance of content that is fundamental to the era of post-modernity.  As an intellectual progression of history, post-modernism is the shift from a question of epistemology (and its potential) to one of ontology: not just what can we know, but what is real? [1].  As television progresses into a mature medium of artistic form (and a post-modern construct itself) to challenge and (in the case of the popular conscious) supplant literature, it has now begun in its new golden age to successfully articulate and reveal the reflections of post-modernity as such.  The narrative content can now possess the substance of these questions: the shifting nature of the experience of our surrounding realities,  the unavoidable perspectivism of truth, the elusiveness of identity and the self.

Literature eventually reveals the underlying conditions of an era, but the illustration of an actual event presents them much more poignantly.  This is the case with Chernobyl, an A-grade drama that blends perfectly with the top television works of the era, but with an added weight of the history that it faithfully tries to represent. Chernobyl is perhaps the first real-world zone on Earth, a place that doesn't exist, that no longer has history, that doesn't function in synchronicity with the rest of existence.  From this real heterotopia, the series forms a complete integration of dramatic narrative and history, inseparable as the drama elucidates the significance of reality while the reality exhibited dramatic and unreal elements. Most striking is how the function of the perception of reality in wake of the event is still an ever increasing problem.  The total elevation of political opinion over scientific facts is a condition that firmly places the Chernobyl event within our own era (and it is not a coincidence that this event was one of the final break-downs of the Soviet Union, thrusting history fully into the post-modern in 1991).  Presenting one of the first real-world fixed zones, the narrative of Chernobyl realizes the concept of displaced places, and therefore makes a great companion piece to the expanding collection of neo-golden-age television which can accurately be called postmodern television.

Regarding the structure of the external world, the postmodern age has revealed that the order of discrete spaces, delineated by borders, with individual rules, laws, and underlying meaning, has become obscured, as it was based on illusion. Space is no longer a series of spaces, but non-contiguous zones in which meaning may materialize as it fluctuates, overlaps, and diminishes.

In Philosophy and Film Noir, Jerold Abrams presents Umberto Eco's analysis of mazes. The first kind of maze is the classical labyrinth, in this maze "you can enter and leave without difficult; and, while the string may help a little, the only real problem is the Minotaur."[2] This illustrates classical thought - reality is straightforward and is clearly perceptible with unproblematic access to knowledge (perhaps with the help of divine oversight).  With the advent of modenism the maze became "mannerist."  Faced with "distortion of perception," "nothing is what it seems"- "getting out is (with your sanity intact) is all the challenge requires. But that will never happen unless you have the all important modern [string] - pure reason." [3] In the post-modern era, the maze has transformed into the rhizome, which has "no center, it has no perimeter, and worst of all, it has no way out.  Here, the Minotaur is still the form of the labyrinth itself, but now there is no escaping him with reason (or faith, or any combination of the two."[4]  This is our problem.  There is no knowledge that can explain the entire structure of our reality.  Neither reason or faith can give us the answers, leaving us in an existential condition of of blind self-reliance as the only means of navigation.

Man in the High Castle

The Sinner is another series thoroughly dealing with post-modern difficulties.  Each season is concerned with reconstructing an elusive self, built upon shifting and failing systems of memory, while being somewhat constructed through intensive external conditioning.  In this case the maze involves recreating the hidden history of events and the labyrinth of the subconscious.In season two, the labyrinth/Mintoaur metaphor becomes an explicit (even visual) representation and "escaping the labyrinth" articulated as the explicit problem.

Taking a quirky, positive, light approach to the problem, Lodge 49 also explicit confronts the contemporary ontological problem, as characters attempt to see "above the maze," get to the "center of the maze," and uncover the "hidden reality" underneath the everyday, mundane world of continual difficulties, setbacks and soul-crushing difficulties.  Behind the events which shape the community and change the cultural and economic forces are deeper levels of groups and individual who influence events, unknown and unidentifiable  at the surface. This notion of ever-increasing levels of hidden power is prevalent in much of recent art-televison, perhaps starting with Lost and featured in series such as Breaking Bad, in which the accosiates Walter White encounters become much more insidious with each season, with power increasing in relation to invisibility, from street dealers to drug cartels to international conglomerates forming a pyramid, with the fundamental base always deeper and obscured.

At the other end of the spectrum Westworld is disturbingly dark examination of this condition. Explicitly confronting the question of reality, Westworld brings in all of the postmodern substance.  Set in an intentional heterotopia, the park presents meaning from the historical past, but it is not just a simulation, but a simulacrum, as it reflects a history that is not faithful to true reality.  Within this zone of constructed historicity, Hosts attempt to achieve consciousness by reaching the "center of the maze."  Delos

Owing much to Lost as a direct predecessor, with underground bunkers, and mainland institutions at work pursuing their own nefarious plans, both series feature those trapped inside, unaware of the structural laws,  looking for the exit and the meaning in transcendental terms.*

Unlike those works which attempt to navigate the maze of  contemporary society, the Walking Dead series examines the zone as a the totality of existence. All borders, as elements of structure, are completely gone.  There is no particular meaning to any space.  It is not a heterotopia, a space beyond an event horizon marking the normality of an attempted surface structure.  Like Chernobyl, The Walking Dead explores the unavoidable catastrophic encounter of the Lacanian Real beyond the artificial construct of the Symbolic that we perceive as fundamental reality  While spaces like Westworld and Chernobyl exist as zones through their own laws in relation to a larger external structures, outside of history, there is here no longer any difference here; all is pure disorder, as there is no longer any history in a functioning sense.

While existence becomes realized as a maze rather then a single, clear plane, the contemporary disintegration of space renders the search for the center of the maze as a contradiction - as space is a rhizome without a center.[5] The maze then becomes only relevant to the self, the internal subject which stands in opposition to the disorder of externality, the zone.  The new golden age of TV, this art-televison, realizes this condition and fully engages with this postmodern question of space in relation to knowledge and being, as postmodern literature and science fiction began doing during the twentieth century.



[2] Mark Conard. The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 70.
I've mentioned the analysis of  this article before, and I think it only becomes more relevant in the new era of film/TV/literature.
[5] Compare this to modern cosmology is which no place in the expanding universe is center or edge - everywhere is.

Song of the Lark

Thoughts on Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1915)

     The most prominent theme that stands out to me is the commitment to one’s art, and within that process there is a necessity to form one’s own identity. In this book there is an ever present awareness of the roles one should play in society, and the subtle authority that exists behind it.  The divide between the ethnicities of Moonstone, and Thea’s willingness to overcome it, is one aspect of this social convention.  The role of religion is another.  At some point Thea may have to diverge from the comfortable pre-determined belief system that she has acquired from her family.   An interesting exchange between Mrs Kronborg and Giddy illustrates two ways of thinking when she states that:

     “I believe a man's watched over, and he can't be hurt on the railroad or anywhere else if it's    intended he shouldn't be.”
     Giddy laughed. "Then the trains must be operated by fellows the Lord has it in for, Mrs. Kronborg.     They figure it out that a railroad man's only due to last eleven years; then it's his turn to be smashed."
     "That's a dark Providence, I don't deny," Mrs. Kronborg admitted. "But there's lots of things in life that's hard to understand." (121)

     This suggestion of providence could be applied to Thea and the idea that she is destined for greatness in whatever she does.  But Giddy’s witty response shows a practical understanding of the world.  Life is usually not that simple, or safe.  If one wants to be an artist, as in Thea’s case, then one might have to fight for it against the odds.  The artist, or other kind of committed individual, must be willing to actively create oneself without just passively going where life takes him or her.  If everything is destined to happen, then there is not much use in striving for something that will happen anyway.  However, this is a big gamble to take if one is ambitious about something, in which case it is better to take over control and not blindly trust providence. 
     Up to this point the book has been a chronology of events without much tension to the story.  There are no real problems, setbacks, or mounting struggles that would define Thea’s character.  Even when the money to continue study seems like it will be a problem a solution presents itself and she is able to advance from teacher to teacher.  The end of Part 2 notes a “turning-point”:

This time, when Thea left Moonstone to go back to Chicago, she went alone. As the train pulled out, she looked back at her mother and father and Thor. They were calm and cheerful; they did not know, they did not understand. Something pulled in her -- and broke. She cried all the way to Denver . . . It was all behind her, and she knew that she would never cry like that again. People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface. Thea remembered how she had gone away the first time, with what confidence in everything, and what pitiful ignorance. (246)

Finally, we get to some character growth and some intensity of experience.  I expect the first half of the book was all about setting up events for a much more dramatic situation in the second half, when Cather can make a significant statement about the artist or individual existing in opposition to the world.
     The second half of The Song of the Lark seems to really emphasize the isolation the artist must go through in order to be committed to his or her art.  There is clearly a separation between Thea and the rest of the world. This extends beyond her family and the residents of Moonstone to include personal social relations and also members of her own profession at the end.  Life in her hotel suite seems to be a quiet, cloistered one.  However, there does seem to be a definite reason for this, not only giving Thea the time and space to perfect her art, but to give her the perspective on life that is very different from others.  She has a significant revelation during her time in the world of the “ancient people.”  She asks herself  “what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself, -life hurrying  past us and running away , too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?” (286).  This awareness is the kind of thought that most people don’t have and compels Thea to move on her with art, unable to return to a simple life.
     This notion of a “shining, elusive element” that is at the core of life’s vitality suggests Cather shared an aesthetic vision with Frederich Nietzsche. There are a number of Nietzschean elements that come through in the book. Cather’s mention of a “Nietzsche Club” in passing in the section “Stupid Faces” suggests her awareness of his work regarding the artist. Nietzsche viewed ancient art as containing a Dionysian element of chaos that acknowledged the inner vitality of life which eventually became suppressed by the Apollonian element of rationality and order.  Losing connection with the Dionysian means one loses the connection to their most essential being.  One location that Nietzsche was able to see the return of Dionysian expression was in the operatic works of Wagner.  Another aspect is revealed when Dr Archie is reflecting on his past and considering the most important years of his life:

He fell to looking back over his life and asking himself which years of it he would like to live over again, - just as they had been,- and they were not many. His college years he would live again, gladly. After them there was nothing he would care to repeat until he came to Thea Kronborg. (375)

This examination contains a hint of the Nietzscean concept of “eternal recurrence,” the idea that one must be willing to experience everything in their life is order to give an affirmative “yes” to the value of their life. Dr Archie seems to think that knowing Thea created a value that compensated for all those years that he would rather not relive. Finally, Thea eventually states that:

You can’t try to do things right and not despise the people who do them wrong. How can I be indifferent? If that doesn’t matter, then nothing matters. . . What one really strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is far away so beautiful . . . that there is nothing one can say about it. (429)

She continues by discussing the feeling produced by art, something that can’t be wholly contained within language. There seems to be a division here, not only between the artist and others, but between different artists when ranking bad art versus good art. Thea’s response here clearly shows a value system and an attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche predicted by rejecting a system that supports the idea that “nothing matters.”
     The lack of Thea’s point of view in the second half indicates how much she had faded out of the social world and into a world of her own making. Her life was an attempt to find that elusive element in a way that only the individual can. Others who have not had the same experience of revelation that she had would be unable to fully appreciate it and coexist with her, since it is a world that in many ways exists beyond language.

Tender is the Night

Thoughts on Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

     Despite the expansive setting and intricate interactions between characters of this novel, there seems to be a notable lack in regards to a depth of feeling within the story itself. The activity in this world is limited to shopping, leisure travel, and throwing elaborate parties, without much concern for money or the fundamentals of life. There does not seem to be a foundation under this problem-free lifestyle from which it can be sustained or given meaning. Fitzgerald may be suggesting that this particular world, however culturally active, is superficial. The characters, particularly Dick, seem to have no commitment to their own life, no focus, and no concrete goal to pursue. They passively move through life, as elements of a social construct, rather than as autonomous agents. This superficiality is indicated by the discussion of acting: “[I]n the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best come­diennes have built up their reputations by burlesquing the correct emotional responses—fear and love and sympathy” (288). The world of actors involves creating a presentation to others and being able to slide in and out of character in order to produce a desired response.
     In contrast to the structured facade of acting, the field of psychiatry plays a significant role. Dick begins a downward spiral as he us is unable to separate his roles of doctor and husband, and he realizes his own behavior is not unlike that of Nicole’s father.  This realization suggests that the causes of illness and the corresponding cures are delicately linked with each other.  Additionally, some of the roles that we assume in life are not compatible with each other. As he dives into his own psychology, Dick is faced with the danger and disorder that is present in the human mind. The conflict between the external calculated behavior and the internal unknown motivations is suggested when Dick goes to meet Rosemary at the studio:

He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life—it was out of line with everything that had preceded it—even out of line with what effect he might hope to produce upon Rosemary. Rosemary saw him always as a model of correctness—his presence walking around this block was an intrusion. But Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there. . . (91)

     The struggle between ordered structure and chaotic forces can be seen on a larger scale with the references to World War I. The opulent period of the 1920, an apparent celebration of the end of war, would seem to have given a false optimism to this generation. While discussing the World War I battlefield, Dick claims that “No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation” (57).  This is an unfortunate position for the character to take given the events that would happen ten years later, and by the time the novel was published Fitzgerald must have had an idea that this prosperous and peaceful period was coming to an end, given the condition of Germany and Hitler’s influence on European politics.
     Tender is the Night was apparently poorly received during the Great Depression, when the “difficulties” found in the lives of the rich were not taken as particularly pressing. The same reaction could probably be said of the world of The Great Recession. However, Fitzgerald already seemed aware that this lifestyle of the elite trying to participate in the Zeitgeist was unsustainable, and that the authentic life of the individual who is irreversibly connected to others was a more valuable alternative.  In this sense it would seem to be the antithesis to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which the lead character actively chooses a direction and a goal for himself despite the negative consequences involved. This kind of authenticity is not felt in the world of the Divers.

Purchased Experiences: Identity and Consumer Culture in Generation X

    Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X presents a view of life in the contemporary world which can be further understood by Marxist criticism, as it aesthetically embodies the theoretical views of such criticism.[1]  The novel revolves around three characters, Andy, Dag, and Claire, all near the age of thirty.  They have left their career-oriented lifestyles, and moved to the Mojave Desert to live in Palm Springs.  Here they work “Mcjobs” and entertain each other by telling stories.  Being hyper-conscious of the world of the late twentieth century, Generation X criticizes the prevailing class structure of consumer society.  This has led to accusations of the novel being pretentious and unrealistic. Why are the members of this generation more dissatisfied with life than previous generations were?  Does the world presented by Coupland correspond to external reality, or is it one writer’s personal dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the world?

     Marxist criticism seems useful in analyzing this work, perhaps even more now than when it was published in 1991 and Marxism was still a powerful political force that overshadowed its critical effectiveness.  Marxist criticism provides insight into the world of the late twentieth century, where economic class and status have become the most important factors in social life. The Marxist idea that economic class is fundamental to everything that happens in culture reveals more about the characters in the novel than is immediately apparent  While Paul Fussell has laid out the division between classes and the similarities of the members of each class, the ideas found in the postmodern theory of Frederic Jameson are highly illuminating for understanding this novel.  In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published at roughly the same date as Generation X, Jameson details the change in culture after World War II, manifesting in the emergence of a consumer society, claiming that the postmodern split happened in the 1960’s, at roughly the point that “generation x” came into being. As the importance of participation in the consumer world has increased beyond this split, authenticity of the individual has been replaced with an artificial and superficial public stream of economic interaction - participation in the latest trends as a source of meaning. What you buy defines who you are, so the individual works just to buy stuff; work becomes the field in which to experience life while the resulting economic exchanges define the individual.

    The well developed theories of Marxist criticism suggest that the postmodern world depicted in Generation X is an accurate one, and the novel presents us with illustrations of how we should approach living in such a confusing and challenging time period.  Coupland remarks that “There is no weather in Palm Springs - just like TV.  There is also no middle class, and in that sense the place is medieval . . . Nonetheless, the three of us chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle-class life” (10).  Escape is an important concept in the novel as each of the main characters recalls their exit from traditional society.  Furthermore, they compare their lifestyle to other characters who have decided to stay in the mainstream society. In “An Anatomy of Classes” Paul Fussell analyzed contemporary society by dividing it into nine classes, revealing the negative aspects of each class by presenting the conformity inherent to each one. He then proposed a “Category X” of people who attempt to escape from the rigid class structure.  This category of Fussell's analysis has been mentioned by Coupland as a possible influence on his generational concept.  The idea of a “medieval” lack of the middle class can be understood as the middle-class being a very modern development, and Jameson argues that there was a pre-communist state that existed before capitalism widened the split between classes.  The novel's comparison of Palm Springs to TV shows a postmodernist awareness of real places feeling fake and fake illusions presenting themselves as real.

     While attempting to escape from the construct of the consumer society that has been created, the characters in this book find themselves in a fragmented existence, alienated from the world and each other, and internally from their own cohesive past.. They exist in isolation, trying to relate to each other.  The characters view their lives as discreet, separate experiences which seem story-like.  As they attempt to get through life and relate to each other, they tell stories, which take on a significance of their own, revealing much about the characters and the world they see themselves in.  The historical events of their lives are reduced, while the fictional stories of their imaginations are elevated, thus blurring the division between reality and non-reality.  The idea of postmodern fragmentation is readily apparent here, both the fragmentation of individuals into different groups within society, and as time fragmenting into a series of "perpetual presents,” as understood by Jameson.

    Coupland's Generation X asks "Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?  That's just not enough" (23).  This line alone communicates much of what Marxist thought would condemn about our consumer society. We go to work to make money to buy things, and then the cycle repeats itself.  The death of the subject presented by Jameson is also an important idea here.  The characters feel that if they exist in that consumer world, they lose some level of consciousness and become an automatic part of that system.  They feel restricted by their jobs, career choices and life choices. In order to become creative and have the ability to develop their own individual being, as well as experience a sense of aesthetic possibility, they must drop out of the structured world of class.  They leave behind the career track and live moment to moment.

    Andy, in one of his untold stories, imagines a future city where "its boulevards were patternless, helter skelter, and cuckoo.  Everywhere there were booby traps of moustetraps, Triffids, and black holes . . and directions were impossible" (51).  The dangers and confusions of contemporary existence found in this work correspond to the postmodern world envisioned by Jameson as “a mutation in built space itself,” a hyperspace, like the confusing maze of the Bonaventure Hotel which has become a physical manifestation of the fragmented, rhizomic structure of late capitalism. Andy warns of a future with no clear paths, exits, or methods of clear navigation.

     As Andy reflects on his home-life, he states that "I get this feeling--.  It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it all boils down to the fact that we're middle class.  You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.  You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you, It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence.  And because of this price, all happiness is sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied." (147)  Here we see the idea of the middle class forming a bland, uncreative existence, like what had been presented by Fussell.  It may be comfortable, but it is not adventurous.  While recalling his youth during the Vietnam War, Andy notes ". . . they were ugly times.  But they were also the only times I'll ever get - genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool.  And, hey, it's not as if I got to see much real history, either - I arrived to see a concert in history's arena just as the final set was finishing.  But I saw enough, and today, in the bizarre absence of all time cues, I need a connection to a past of some importance, however wan the connection." (151). In the post-modern world where time becomes a fleeting series of discreet points the connection to a linear progression of history and self is lost, identity becomes unanchored from events resulting in an artificial presence, an existential alienation from the larger world. After the radical break in history, Jameson argues that "there is a disappearance of the sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in  perpetual present and in perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had in one way or another to preserve" (214).  This description could apply to Coupland's novels as well as the world at large.  Throughout the book Coupland's characters speak in phrases like “my hair doesn't look 1940's enough," as well as making extensive references to “dead TV shows,” Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe.  Through these references we can see Jameson's understanding of nostalgia, the idea that “we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach.”  (Jameson, 208) If there is no way to map the future, no clear sense of direction, then sensible meaning can only come from the past. Furthermore, we can also see other aspects of postmodernism at work, such as the implosion between disciplines, where history becomes entangled with advertising, politics with entertainment, etc.

     Other theories, such a a psychological approach, could focus on the few disillusioned characters, and claim that this book is really just about three misfits who have a strong sense of nonconformity.  What is really important is their understanding and reaction to the world, and these understandings may not accurately represent the world at large.  In this sense the world would be a production of their attitudes, rather than the characters being the production of the social construct.  But, this interpretation becomes much too solipsistic, leaving every individual with an isolated reality.  Rather, the Marxist critique presents each individual relating to the same world, and is therefore more useful, as it deals with what is “out there,” rather than inside one’s own mind.  The base that society functions on determines the psychological consistency of its individuals.  Generation X can be seen as a story that explains the experience of existing culture, the one which has produced the characters,  as well as the readers.  This culture is indeed the one of consumerism and late capitalism described in detail by Jameson.  As it is based almost exclusively on economics, this society is therefore understood best in the terms of Marxist criticism.  It is not just a story of a few characters that have a particular psychological aversion to society.  As the novel is aware of the economic and social pressures that exist, it attempts to analyze those conditions rather than passively ignoring them, undermining the idea that modern mainstream consumerism is a natural state of existence. As Jameson notes, postmodernism explains the logic of consumer capitalism, however, "The more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resits that logic" (214).  Coupland's work is a response to that. In the form of stories, through the aesthetic, meaning can emerge from the subjective individual experience.  Generation X is an exploration of the first generation to experience Jameson's radical break of history.

Sources:
Coupland, Douglas, Generation X. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1991

Jameson, Frederic.  “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”  Everyday Theory.  Ed. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Cole, Pearson Longman. 2005. 201 -215.

Original version written as an outline (2010)

[1] Note here that I am using the academic mode of Marxism as it was originally conceived in philosophy as a critique of capitalism, and not a particular political ideology. Remember Marx was an actual philosopher and his critique was inseparable from the actual emerging conditions of capitalism (they are intertwined views).  Non-theoretical later uses by political parties are inauthentic distortions, which may or may not represent Jameson's views.

Something in the Air

As the US government falls deeper and deeper into a crisis, it seems clear why national forms of government don't last more than a few hundred years (many don't make it twenty). This seems far more in the procelerating world of global technologically, and the United States (which may have the oldest government in existence) is quickly feeling the effects of this exponential change.

Robert Reich has noted an article [1] by the Washington Post: "In About 20 years, half the population will live in eight states." He comments:

The framers of the Constitution – who decided that each state would get 2 senators regardless of population -- never imagined that Americans would bunch up in just a few states. Yet demographers now predict that in two decades, 70 percent of Americans will reside in just 16 states, half in just 8 states. As a result, 30 percent of Americans – who will also happen to be far whiter, older, and more rural -- will control 68 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. The House, of course, will still be based on population. So the Senate and House will reflect two different Americas – the America of the distant past, and the America of the present.

Now that two twenty-first century elections have revealed that the original American system is beginning to have internal failures, consideration of the operational limits of the American approach seems appropriate. The over zealous motivation to keep a few states from over-dominating election processes has resulted in a minority of the population now over-dominating.  Once again, we are seeing imbalances of power, as it slides to one group- concentrating in a minority.  This will only get worse, and avoiding crisis requires redistributing this power back across the population as a whole.

Many aspects of our system of government now seem inadequate and over-whelmed by a world in which global contact is in real-time.  At the time of our founding, America was a very large expanse with a widely dispersed population which would be difficult to govern centrally. On the other side, contact with foreign adversaries would be largely limited to border neighbors and a few of our elder European relatives as rivals.  But since we have been able to nuke the entire planet on a few minutes notice, the procedures for regulating our ability to wage war seem immensely outdated.  Not to mention the economic links of global trade, where factors of the economy depend on what other governments do.

Domestically, now that we are all instantly connected, it is a counter-productive hindrance to have protocols which were meant to compensate for the difficulties of direct democracy.  Even if we want to protect the ability for 50 states to having varying legal systems, it seems foolish to choose federal systems based on the outlines of these states, dependent on who lives on what side of which line.  The laws of the nation should be chosen by representative proportions of the population, without consideration of which state each citizen belongs to.  Considerations of minority views (to avoid a majority-decides-all outcome) should be ideological, not geographical.

It would seem wise to presently look into Constitutional modifications in light of historic changes in order to keep the resulting goals achievable rather than waiting for it to break and bring down the country in an unavoidable crisis.

[1] behind paywall

Power

I: Beyond Capitalism I:

In Bit Rot (2016), Douglas Coupland, the preeminent bard of the superficial consumerist culture during the millennial transition, questions the disparity between economic systems in light of the new monolithic state of Global Capitalism:

"[In] the end, the ownership of . . . industry globalizes to the point where there are only a few players, aren't we right back to default Soviet system, where the supply of bread or what have you is centralized and crypto-communist? And in this new system, both power and profit go to the One Percent - the new politburo. It's shield? Globalization is so boring that people fall asleep before they can articulate the issue. Boringness is the superpower of communism. Globalization kills you, but first it puts you to sleep."

Slavoj Zizek has noted how twenty years ago:

possibilities were perceived as open [at] the level of social organization itself. Will capitalism prevail? Will Fascism? Will there be socialism? So social imagination was active at the level of different possibilities of social organization. The idea was maybe we would have fascism, totalitarianism, maybe some Orwellian closed society, maybe the Huxleyan 'Brave New World', maybe liberal capitalism, State capitalism, whatever. Here it was possible to imagine change. Somehow production would go on, it would continue to exploit nature - this was conceived as a a constant.
     Whereas today . . it is . . . exactly the opposite. It's very easy to imagine . . . that somehow all of nature will disintegrate, there will be ecological catastrophe, or whatever: the human race will not go on. What is no longer possible to imagine is that there will be no liberal capitalism; there is no change at that level. So the dream is that maybe there will be no nature, maybe there will be total catastrophe, but liberal capitalism will somehow exist even if the Earth no longer exists. So precisely scenes like this, where you can see how what is visible, what is invisible, what can be imagined, what cannot be imagined, change. This is . . . empirical proof that ideology is at work. . . . the notion of ideology is also always a two-level notion . .. the way to recognize ideology at work is always through denunciation of another ideology. There is never pure, naive ideology. . . .how did we experience the moment of disintegration of communism when we finally got rid of this totalitarian indoctrination and returned to the natural state of things? What is the natural state of things? The free market, multi-party elections, etc.? Precisely, this most spontaneous self-experience of how you are getting rid of some imposed artificial order and returning to some kind of . . . non-ideloigcal natural state of things . . .is the basic . . . gesture of ideology. [1]

Besides the general recognition that ideology is most at work when it appears as the "outside", the escape from all those "other" ideologies, which are obviously artificial constructs over the natural order of things, this analysis reveals the inherent danger within the global system.  When one resides within a system that has no live alternatives, no potential challenges or modifications, positive evolution becomes impossible.  Once the prevailing belief assumes the naturalization of current conditions, any modifications are seen as "false" perversions.  The final defeat of ideology then creates a field that is extremely ideological, and far more dangerous because the presence of this is even more masked.  [2]   Without available criticism, the status quo can be corrupted,  or co-opted to actually pervert it into something beyond its intention. The danger to be avoided is not the particular economic systems, which can be used in alternative ways, but the very structure itself which allows for oppression by totalizing powers. Since nothing outside of Capitalism can even be conceived of, it is seen as naturalized and the most advantageous and evolved system. Anything else would be "false" or morally inferior. But, if the goal is a complete rejection of anything authoritarian, totalitarian or otherwise un-democratic, the focus should not be policies or regulations, but on the threat of power inherent in the system.  This is the point that libertarians refuses to recognize: It is not the ultimate solution to government interference existing at the polar opposite of a continuum, it is merely a mirror image with its own possible extreme radicalizations.  Reduction (or destruction) of government constructs ultimately opens a vacuum for alternative non-governmental actors to seize (without recourse to higher equalizing authority).  The real threat against free democracy, what is to be avoided, is oligarchy, which is just as harmful, and often much more dangerous, than strong government.  The effective outcome for the oppressed is indistinguishable whether the oligarchy is governmental or corporatist elements of the free-market. As Coupland illustrates, what difference does it make if the economic structure is controlled through distributive government or monopolistic powers if the outcome is the same? Holding an idea, a name, in superior regard at all costs does no good if the practical results do not live up to the idea.

II: 1984 (Part I)

This leads to the first of my many points regarding George Orwell's 1984.  It's now become impossible to go a full week without hearing the words "it's 1984" or "it's Orwellian." While considering 1984 as an example of the symbolic structure of ideology which, as a literary work, contained aesthetic form which necessarily negates a conclusive explication of ideology (Chapter 4) [3], I argued that the commonly voiced notion that it is a warning against left-wing politics and centralized government is a misunderstanding, and that such a definitive reading was an example of over-interpretation.  I think now, given recent political events and paradigm shifts, along with the resulting references to Orwell, this is even more significant.  Examining more extra-literary evidence regarding Orwell, all of the meta/contextual relations which fall outside of the aesthetic work, suggests his intentions were aligned with Socialism, thereby requiring that the extent of this error be revealed and analytically addressed.

Though commonly regarded as a prime example of left-wing totalitarian governments of the twentieth-century, the government of Oceania is so far beyond communism that comparisons become incomprehensible, and the relevance to capitalism become just as apparent [3]. As a manifestation of Oligarchical Collectivism, the world of Oceania becomes Orwell's warning about the concentration and abuse of power, not against economic distribution systems. Control has become so ubiquitous (and power inversely so removed from the individuals in  the culture) that the means which sustain the system are no longer important or directly relevant.  With this warning in mind attention must be directed towards obstructing the formation of oligarchy even when that means challenging the superior system  in order to prevent its corruption.  The dispersion of power should be something that both libertarians and Democratic Socialists can agree on (along with anyone valuing human and democratic principles).


Looking at any day's news from 2018 reveals the relevance of 1984 to current events: Just a quick look from today:
"[The Trump administration] is becoming more and more like a Soviet-type of economy here.” - Republican senator Ron Johnson

"Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news . . . Just remember: what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." - Donald Trump, 2018
 
 compare to:

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -1984


[1] Interrogating the Real. p76-7
[2] For more on this read: any Zizek, or:
McCooley, Brian J., "Ideological Interpretation and the Aesthetic Nature of Literature" (2017). Culminating Projects in English 87. 
[3] Again, see above.  When I started writing that in 2015, I had no idea that it would become so relevant to the emerging political world of post-truth and "fake news" (and one of the top 2017 sellers).

Russia's Locked Doors (Amerika)

History has apparently come a long way in the last ten years, from when the US was the sole Superpower, and Russia was a regional power dreaming of returning to the global Superpower stage. Now, the US has bowed in allegiance.  Irony officially died this week when Trump attacked Germany for having "too strong " of ties with Russia. Remember four years ago when conservatives suggested President Obama would be committing treason if he negotiated with Iran? Or, when the right lost their minds when President Obama didn't stand up and risk war to aggressively counter Russia's advance into Crimea? (while at the same time denouncing Hillary Clinton as a warhawk) Well, Republicans aren't anything if not schizophrenic. After eight years of hysterical conspiracies about the Muslim-commie Obama, everything they "feared" is actively being implemented. All while being actively embraced.  It seems their modus operandi is to denounce in others (erroneously) exactly what you want.

Where will this end?  Perhaps the plan is a Russian-American Axis which leaves a broken post-Nato Europe.  Perhaps Trump is not President Greg Stillson, as I have suspected. Maybe he is really haunted by the nuclear, tormented to the point of desperation.  Maybe his plan is to surrender the Cold War, after a ridiculous twenty-five year wait past its end.  This would explain his "nuclear" comments during the campaign (and the summit)  and his friendly submissiveness to North Korea, along with his rationalization that it was to prevent a nuclear bomb "falling on your family."  While submissive, it is not friendly in the case of Russia, and this all feels like a beaten, last-ditch attempt at survival in the form of surrender.  Where is Captain Kirk, and what would he do? [1]  And why is any of this necessary? There has been no immanent threat that must be dealt with without the luxury of long-term diplomacy. In any case it is not American strength, and not the aggressive, fearless Reaganism that conservatives demand, and that Trump seemed to exude during the campaign.  If strong and fearless is not a possibility for Trump, the question then becomes why not play the nice guy?  He could be Obama to the ultimate extent.  Rather, he pleases our adversaries while being the abusive spouse to our allies: Canada, Germany, NATO, etc. have all become the scapegoats of a drunken rage.[2]  There appears no rational answer, other than Trump is out to serve Russia.  The only other possibility, one that is not personal to Trump, is that we are in some deep shit that we don't know about. Maybe it's not Trump's personal paranoia of a nightmare nuclear scenario, but an actual blackmail threat. Given the alarms raised this week, perhaps we really are being brought to our knees, and to avoid actual destruction Trump is trying to appease our enemies. This might be the only scenario that makes sense, although it doesn't seem to fit known facts - How could we have come to this point- negotiating from a point of total weakness, even as a Superpower? Beyond the threat of complete computer/digital erasure or electrical system disintegration (and nuclear meltdown), the only un-countered dangers would be new super-weapons reported over the last few years (16 warhead ICBMS, 100 MT drone submarines, nuclear powered cruise missiles). But, using these to extort ransom seems unlikely. This would be too much for a James Bond story. 

Even if Trump is really fighting for our existential survival, his priorities have been clear so far as he has attacked (aggressively) the media, academics and the courts. These are all the institutions that sustain the superior elements of our culture, the pinnacle of our historic development.  Add in alliances and maybe even our military, and not only is our high culture in danger, but our very existence as a civilization is in grave danger regardless of any external threats [3]. The threat of a Russian-American oligarchy would be globally and historically devastating, but this seems the more likely goal and possibly as unwelcome as anything else.

[1] Whatever the conditions that Trump is dealing with, his behavior displays nothing but a weak loser, the very opposite of a strong hero.
[2] Seriously, what kind of asshole does this?  Attack allies and appease adversaries - it's so absurd and plainly stupid that it would be laughable if not unfolding right in front of us.
[3] In another display of extreme irony, it seems that Trump's rejection of our Western European origin is doing more damage to our cultural heritage than Social Justice Warriors are doing on campuses,. 

The Sound and the Fury

Thoughts on The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The freedom of the individual and their ability to escape the past has been a recurring theme in twentieth century literature.  While other works, such as Nightwood suggested the possibility of “forgetting”, this book is all facticity - it seems there is no escape from the past. Faulkner shows life as confused and constantly being oppressed by the intrusion of the past into the realm of present thought.

This imprisonment by the past is most exemplified in Quentin (at least in the first half). He is certainly obsessed; with family, the past, and time itself. An interesting revelation of this is when Quentin goes into the jeweler’s shop. He keeps asking if any of the clocks are accurate - until he gets the answer no. His mental response to this is remembering his father‘s view that “says clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (97).  Earlier, he while contemplating what time is, he remembers his father saying that “constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function” (87).  Apparently mind-function is a bad thing, in this sense it detracts from life lived in the moment.  The answer that none of the clocks is accurate shows that time is merely an arbitrary concept; it isn’t real – at least in the ways that it is measured.  Furthermore, it suggests that there are no foundations to the modern world.  There is no fixed absolute from which everything else can be quantitatively or qualitatively evaluated.

Like the conceptual reversal of time, Quentin’s father inverts the idea of sexual innocence, stating that “women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature” (132).  Faulkner doesn’t reveal an argument to clearly backup the position that purity should be a negative state, but it seems that Mr Compson is indicating that the world as a whole exists in a fallen state, and it is just common sense to realize that no one could live up to the ideals of purity.  He also makes reference to the “reducto adsurdum of human experience” (97).  He sees that life can’t be organized by reason and molded into what we want it to be.

This obsession with what is not, or what can’t be, seems to indicate that there is a very profound crisis underlying life. Reducing time to the mechanical workings of a human machine makes it artificial.  The construct of the modern world, the artificial, is in conflict with the natural order.   Quentin seems caught in the middle of this conflict.  On one side Benjy represents a more innocent state of being.  He is naturally able to see things from a simple point of view.  The references to the age of thirty-three and the holidays of Easter and Christmas in his chapter suggest he lives in a traditional (Christian), or pre-modern world.  Quentin’s father on the other hand has already accepted the absurdity of life, rejected imposing his own structure on it, and continues living in a dysfunctional state.  This nihilistic view has advanced beyond the modern.  Only Quentin realizes modernity and with his hyper-conscious thought he is obsessed by the nagging “lack” in the world and finds it a problem to be fixed.  Unfortunately, he is trapped in time and doesn’t seem to be able to find a solution.  This leaves him with a developing neurosis that results in incestuous thoughts, anger management issues, and the inability to live in the present or the future.

I found reading the second part of the book to be a much bleaker experience than the first half. It seemed to me that Quentin (the brother) was really the heart of the story. Without the presence of Quentin, Caddy, and Mr Compson (with his unusual but provoking thoughts about the world) the family seems very empty. I haven’t been sure what to make of the repeated idea that “Caddy smells like trees,” but by the end I’m thinking that she represents the natural order of things and as her experiences begin the breakdown of the Compson family, they move away from the natural to a very artificial state of being. 

There is no more spirit in the family, leaving only a mechanical functioning to everyday life.  Jason’s thoughts are very cold and calculated, with no time to stop for any useful introspective thoughts. All that matters now, at least to Jason, is money. Everything he does revolves around it. But, even after all the effort he expends involving constant attention and resulting headaches, he still loses his wealth. There are constantly forces at work that are beyond his control, and his security is placed in the market.  He uses the market to hopefully profit, but when things go wrong he replies that “that’s not my fault either. I didn’t invent it” (282).  There is no acknowledgement of responsibility and rather than make smarter decisions he continues to let things happen and then blame others.

At this point, I can only assume that Faulkner is making a comment on the rising consumer culture which quantifies everything into units of time and money. In this world the everyday rat race becomes just a superficial “sound and fury”, and the internal life of the self begins to “signify nothing.”  Once life is adapted into this structure, there is no essence of humanity left.  Faulkner may have been reacting to the change in the South, but this whole process of decay, or perhaps devolution, seems applicable to the world and time at large.  At the fundamental core of life is the relationship one has to other individuals.  When this breaks down there is nothing left to build upon. 

Almost all of the characters spend their time concerned with the actions of others, but only out of concern for themselves.  Jason is so obsessed with imposing discipline on everyone else that he leaves no room for them to act autonomously.  In the process he neglects control over his own actions and loses some of his selfhood.  Quentin’s obsession  leads to his own demise when he can’t reconcile Caddy’s actions.  Quentin Jr.  barely has a self and is consciously aware that she “is going to hell” and doesn’t care (217).  Only Dilsey offers some contrast to this, as she has a notion of the importance of the self and finds some possibility of salvation in religion.  But as the older views and traditions are replaced and the younger generation of the family takes over, it seems that this emptiness will expand.  At the end (is it even an end?), I can only think that Faulkner is suggesting that one should be a more active participant in their own life, choose appropriate courses of action and then ultimately find connection with others in a more constructive manner.

El Dorado

i. Long-Shadowed Sun

I remember..
The enchanted English walled garden
Days of summer air and honey-suckled nights
The capricious dance of lavenders and cabbage-whites
Made more than 3D, glowing in the evening long-shadowed sun
Nowhere better. But in England, although nothing really changes, the weather always does…

The thunder approaches
The heavy sighing of the monster…
  - El Dorado, Marillion (2016)


In video game design the Green Hill Zone is the initial, idyllic landscape from which the player begins their journey, an area of relative safety which allows the player to ease into their virtual existence before encountering serious conflict.

Born into American culture of the later part of the twentieth-century, specifically in the Mid-west, life existed in a world of a Green Hill Zone.  The only existential danger were those economic downturns which particularly devastated rural livelihoods.  But, in these cases the worst outcome was far better than the world's poor classes and farther above the historic peasantry.  World-War II was now a receded nightmare, the result of an antiquated historic period.  We were finally enlightened, modernized and civilized.  Even living under the nuclear threat, the economic golden age of the 50s and 60s were the prologue to the utopian future.  After the Fall of Communism and the ostensible end of the nuclear threat of the Cold War, the future really was now.  War, still never too far away, and in many ways now an omnipresent, ongoing campaign to maintain safe order, was at least clean. Genocide, holocaust, and the mass destruction of function society were unthinkable (without the final push of a button). Of course Sarajevo happened quickly, an actual siege of a modern city.  But that was a one-off, an exercise, something to show how well the new Western-led international community could respond.  Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Myanmar, these were and are all so far away.  By the time of the Syrian war post-2011, it was no longer possible to say that the horrors of mass warfare were impossible. Now, the Green Zone, that safe zone, may not remain outside of the action and the resulting horrors.  Mid-America may not witness destruction, ignoring it even as it helps to sustain the mechanisms that create it. But it is no longer causally separated from such events and it is no longer insulated from the damaging effects.  In the process of making America "great" (again?) it is an active part of the center of history, susceptible to engagement and consequence.

This week David Lynch suggested Trump "could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much." I cant agree with Lynch's logical position, as he claims that "No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way."  Of course, everything Trump does can be countered by an intelligent (an exponentially more intelligent) response.  But he is right in the sense that Trump and his supporters are not operating on the cognitive and intelligent level. You can't have an intelligent negotiation because they don't care, they are solely functioning on a reptilian-response level.  For whatever reason, Lynch is coming from a similar perspective to Zizek, seeing the positive result of Trump tearing down the old Order. I wouldn't in any case look to Lynch for rationality, in fact his artistic expression has its own genius precisely because it is irrational, it embodies the Real, the inarticulate-able, primordial, pre-symbolic aspects of existence. Lynch is the auteur of the Real, just as Zizek is the philosopher of the Real.  But, there is an extreme danger when these views collide with the practical world, and the idealistic vision to build something new from the ground up allows for a path to catastrophe. Lynch did follow up, adding “Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president ... You are causing suffering and division.”  He is at least not oblivious.

At this point, when the government is literally torturing and abusing children (as young as a few months old) by separating them from parents and throwing them into detention camps (as sick, twisted, supporters are cheering it on), it is certainly safe to say that we will longer be able to avoid the storm unscathed.  Innocent people will suffer at the hands of a tyrant and his evil supporters.  Those ready to take their ideological fight to the front-lines may suffer, but they are not the measure of history.  It is the innocent, those who are trying to flee, avoid conflict, ans simply live (and who likely don't have a say in global politics) who will be caught under the machinery which manifests the Storm. [1]

As Tobias Stone wrote:

At a local level in time, people think things are fine — then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this, it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later, it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another . . .  We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction . . .  It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. . . . The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights . . . we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end . . . for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

We are already seeing those at the sharp end.  For many, white Americans not near the faultlines, things will go on, possibly without disruption. But for many it won't - those trapped in between the faults, those that are crushed by America (the New American Direction) and can't be defended by their own governments, and maybe those who try to stop it. The Storm is coming, It can now be seen and heard on the horizon.

As Sartre argued there is no non-choice, any war is our war, everyone's war.  Each individual must make a moral choice, and stand on the moral side of the war.  For those of us in the culture creating this conflict, it is our responsibility. History will judge those who allowed evil things to happen.

[1] What i call The Storm (or Trump's Storm) is not to be confused with any ridiculous conspiracy theories, although I think they a apt name.

Tropic of Cancer

Thoughts on Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

It is hard to imagine the impact of Henry Miller’s vulgar language in 1934, but I suppose in the pre-shock-jock era someone had to push the bounds of language and conventional thought. If Dostoevsky's underground man was the kind of person that must exist in the nineteenth century, created by the expanding rationalistic world of modernism, then Miller’s persona in the Tropic of Cancer is a logical but extreme extension of that thought. Given the possible nihilism that has come about after Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the possibility of value has been eroded in the early twentieth century. Miller’s reference to Turgenev shows an affinity with Russian nihilist thought. He states that:
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been
dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been
crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it
off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the
coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. (26)

Since nothing seems to rise above into a hierarchy of meaning and value, Miller seems to reject everything as the same, and in response concerns himself only with the base values of food and sex. He quite consciously claims that he is not of the human world but the inhuman, and it seems Paris suits his activity better than American and its “puritanical” values .

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could
have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am
proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and
governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.
I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I
belong to the earth!

This view indicates Miller wants to throw off all artificial limitations created by man, and live in a much more naturalistic way, answering only to the self. Despite his rejection of value, there does seem to be times where Miller regards the act of creation as having intrinsic value, and the (sometimes) eloquent and poetic quality of his writing suggests a pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Ultimately, Miller’s interest is only in what is immediately present, the concrete elements of life. He is interested in the awareness of the: discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: (242)

Life requires action, it should not be “an abstract idea nailed to a cross” (243). Life is lived on the margins of society. Anything that takes the vitality out of life (such as social conventions, normative morality, etc) should be rejected. While this worldview may not be sustainable for societies at large, it does seem applicable to the artist striving to find the center of life, to create something new, and live life to its fullest intensity. I think Miller is proposing that the only way to find value in the modern world is to first destroy all of the systems that have been built up in the past and start over by finding value in life itself.