20. VI 2020
Oklahoma
It has been three months since the beginning of the pandemic, more precisely, since the admission of its existence, and the beginning of the most spectacular collapse of a presidency in American history. After three and a half years of political theatre of the absurd, the 45th president is standing alone, fully exposed as the most colossal failure a high office has ever seen, guilty and crumbling under the growing burden of responsibility, which he is hopelessly trying to deflect.
So far the narratives he launched in his defense have been largely either stillborn lies — short lived, ridiculed and disputed even before they were completely uttered — or, at best, they got drowned at inception in the cross-media cacophony. He is addicted to lies, but his lies refuse to stick. He has been in a desperate need for their real-time audio-visual validation – a confirmation that someone, anyone, can still find them believable.
As poll numbers are in a nosedive, the imploding echo chamber of his sycophants has been getting quieter by the day. Nothing seems to be working for this infantile geriatric whiner.
At the same time, his transgressions were getting graver and their baggage heavier – it continues to reinforce itself requiring new transgressions to cover old ones up, drawing an ever-expanding circle of collaborators inside the event horizon.
The stakes are getting higher and risks more extreme. The prospect of finding himself unprotected by the shield of the presidential office is alarmingly realistic and overwhelmingly likely while his legal and political liabilities are reaching toxic levels, all this only five months before the elections.
And he can’t take risks — he has never been able to; his entire life has been about deflecting responsibility.
Serious withdrawal symptoms from his addiction to lies are beginning to erupt through their somatic manifestations. He needs a new fix – a more potent drug and a higher dose of it. His position requires a higher level of unconditional commitment – no longer a cheerleading choir, but a new installment of high-stakes articles of faith by his eroding base in order to satiate his habit and diffuse the anxiety of withdrawal. What is happening today in Oklahoma is the inauguration of nothing short of a political suicide cult. The spirit of Jim Jones is palpable.
2. V 2020
The Uprising Decomplexified: The Logic of Armed Protests
White American males have always been in charge. They made the rules and they called the shots in the workplace, in the home and at the ballot box. They’ve owned the world for so long and have been getting increasingly uncomfortable as their grip on power had been eroding. Now the unthinkable is happening: They are becoming the minority. For the first time more minority babies were born than white babies; black president had served two terms, his Secretary of State was a woman; the most educated segment of the society are black women, and every other daytime talk show or news anchor is gay. This is what all the white rage is really about (the last “A” in MAGA implies this shouldn’t be allowed to happen again).
Suddenly this country is way off the main path; the whole system needs to be restored and some reset buttons need to be pushed. The problem requires a systematic approach.Restoring order means the resolute masculinization of society starting by arming men with weapons – the more lethal, the more masculine they are – establishing male supremacy values (this has worked since the Stone Age, and it should continue to work in the 21st century as well), and establishing a fear of god — this helps the male cause because god is a dude (white, of course).
25. III 2020
Divesting from reality as a principle of governing
It is only Wednesday and the week has delivered enough unreason to last for the entire month. There is a distinct Jim Jones-esque vibe in coordinated right-wingers’ call to premature return to work – sort of capitalist jihadism that resonates with the insane base. It is a deliberate tactical move to mobilize emotions and recenter the discourse by creating a fictitious reality that is closer to the failed political response the the pandemics, rather than adjusting the response to the actual reality.
22.IV 2018
Digital panopticon and the triumph of the unfree will
The smart phone is not just a surveillance apparatus, it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue of the Digital. “Like” is the digital “Amen” (B. C. Han)
Digital society is a big congregation, over two billion of Facebook users worldwide, about a third of the planet’s population, and over 250 million in the US alone, the entire voting age and twice the 2016 turnout. Their digital soul, the complement of the real one, is there on display for anyone to mess with, if that can serve some purpose — commercial, political or otherwise. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Smartphones are digital windows into the innermost corners of the psyche of this enormous congregation. They provide access to their unfulfilled desires and frustrated egos, fears, tastes, and political leanings.
Smartphones have become a tool for governing — they enable one to shape opinions, diffuse dissent, streamline emotions, manufacture consensus, assassinate opponents, stage revolutions, and declare wars and victories, imaginary and real, all alike. In the configuration of total transparency and social pornographication everything is subject to influence and on disposal to anyone who has the attention or who wins the ratings war. Transparency is a curse. It suppresses deviation, abhors individual opinion, and extinguishes free will. Everyone is watching everyone else; invisible moderators smooth out communication and calibrate it to what is generally understood and accepted[1]. There is no room for and no language to express disagreement – there is only “Like”.
However, as B. C. Han points out, something is alive only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself, its force consists in an ability to hold and endure contradictions within[2]. Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. In a society of outsiders idiosyncrasy has a great appeal and mobilizing power. But, superfluidity of the social media transforms idiosyncratic into collective. Individual instabilities become part of the collective Eros and destabilizing on a systemic level. The collective absorbs all libidinal forces through persistent self-reinforcement and, in that process, acquires enormous coercive potential, until there is only one opinion, one emotion and one voice. The digital panopticon becomes a communism of affects and democracy a polite dictatorship.
[1] B. C. Han, Fröhliche Wissenschaft: Agonie des Eros, Matthes & Seitz Berlin (2012)
[2] ibid.
9. VI 2016
The politics of time
We live in an era of subverted time flow. In the post-modern culture of the instant, the most important technological discoveries, although addressing efficiency of transportation and production, have been really about efficient usage of time. With unconditional resentment spreading of anything that resembles idle time, procrastination has become like waiting, a universally denigrated mode of passage of time. Culture waging a war against procrastination has no room for taking distance, reflection, continuity, tradition -that Wiederholung (recapitulation) that according to Heidegger was the modality of Being as we know it. Abandonment of denial of immediacy is a novelty in modern history. It underscores doubts about the arrival of the future. Later means mañana — the future is denied a chance. The moment of no waiting never arrives and Godot takes the central stage.
Subjective time
Understanding the world requires one to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, we magnify. Things that are too large, we reduce. We bring everything within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it. When all distances have been fixed, we call it knowledge. Throughout our adolescence we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, learn, experience and make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been set in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening, we are 40,50, 60,… Meaning requires content, content requires time, thime requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy is meaning*.
* From: K. O. Knausgard, My stragle: Book 1
Work time
It is not capitalist exploitation what makes work alienating, but reduction of life to work.
Work is a paid activity performed on behalf of a third person, to achieve goals we have not chosen for ourselves, according to the procedures and schedules laid down by the persons paying our wages. Labor time is unfree time, imposed upon the individual (originally even by force) to the benefit of alien (tautological) end.
Since the first days of industrial age, the compromise according to which workers allocate some of their time to work in order to enjoy their free time is perfectly rational. Seen by the capital, on the other hand, free time is empty and useless time. Economic rationality demands that any constraint which presents an obstacle to capital accumulation be removed. The end result is austerity of free time – free time should be minimized or austerely rationed. As a result of rationality of both sides, the employer and the employee (capital and labor) stand in direct opposition to each other when it comes to time and this defines their basic antagonism whose unfolding is seeing a new chapter in the tech era.
The most powerful technological forces have established a new normative model in the culture of the entrepreneurship of the self, which has become standard in the western world, where there is pressure to be constantly present and engaged. Not being switched on means falling behind, being out of step and thus losing a competitive edge.
The antagonism between labor and free time exposes the intrinsic contradiction of rationality and its transformation path in industrial age. Rationality, when set free and unchecked, demands removal of any obstacle to profit maximization. The end result? Workers no longer behave rationally: Instead of working for living, they live to work – their work no longer serves to subsidize the enjoyment of their free time, but they use their free time to become more productive workers.
Waiting
What will we wait for when we no longer need to wait to arrive? We wait for the coming of what abides. And what abides will be the unceasingly available instant that no longer has to be waited for (Paul Virilio).
Waiting has been the central idea of narrative from Homer to Hollywood, but has never been properly mapped. Waiting for Godot is the first play about waiting. H. Schweizer’s “On Waiting” is a modern analysis of the concept. Waiting is universally denigrated. It lacks the charm of boredom or desire. It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. Waiting is not simply a passage of time — waiting time must be endured rather than traversed. Time during waiting is slow and thick.
Money confuses time with itself — money culture recognizes no currency but its own. Waiting is assigned to the poor and powerless so as to ritualistically reinforce social and political demarcation.
Waiting always carries hierarchical overtones — long waiting lines are for the people with less dignity and self-pride, disenfranchised folks in general (e.g. long lines for visa applications, residency permits, asylum…).
Postmodernity is characterized by an ever accelerating contraction of duration. Blackberries and iPhones (general hyper-connectivity interfaces) deliver information without making us wait. (Our writing is facing an extinction of comma that once indicated a pause.) From the modern perspective, waiting means almost always never. The indignities of waiting in a culture of the instant are the discomfort of being out of sync with modernity and with the habit of velocity.
Procrastination
The central idea of modernity is procrastination. One procrastinates in order to be better prepared to grasp things that truly matter. Max Weber links this particular intent to delay (rather than haste and impatience) to such seminal modern innovations as accumulation of capital and the spread and entrenchment of the work ethic. The denial of immediacy and the principle of delay of gratification is what rendered the scene modern to begin with.
The desire for improvement gave the effort its traction and momentum; but the caveat ‘not yet’, ‘not just now’, directed that effort towards its unanticipated consequence, as growth, development, acceleration and, for that matter, modern society*.
The need to wait magnified the seductive powers of the prize. Far from degrading the gratification of desires, the precept to postpone it made it into the supreme purpose of life. Owing to its ambivalence, procrastination fed two opposite developments: work ethic (in the society of producers, the ethical principle of delayed gratification used to secure the durability of the work effort) and aesthetic of consumption (in the society of consumers, the same principle may be still needed in practice to secure the durability of desire).
* Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity
11. IV 2016
Media & Content
“What you need to control a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity”.
This looks like an exact description of the media landscape today. We have a seemingly huge diversity of opinions (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, main networks, talking heads, blogs, magazines, Tweets,…), but comparatively little information. Our minds operate under constant informational overload, but we are unable to extract much meaning. This is the age of semiotic inflation (or hyperinflation): more information buys less meaning. And, if we have reached the state where the first sentence sounds like an accurate summary of today’s media, we should be really alarmed, because its author is Josef Goebbels.
Remember Howard Beale in the 1976 TV Network (I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more)? To refresh our memories, here are the excerpts from his rants. They still sound fresh, relevant and spot on as they did 40 years ago.
Television is not the truth. Television’s a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business.
So if you want the Truth, go to God! Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever gonna find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he’s gonna win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear.
We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!.
9. IV 2016
Facts & consensus
Facts have low (or no) marketing value. They represent a definitive statements on a particular theme that does not spark controversies or encourage further debates. Controversy, polarization of opinions can not coexist with facts. They are the end of any discussion, a way of censorship. Only fools can disagree with or debate them. Facts are boring and have no entertainment value either, so their potential for generating profits is minimal. Unequivocal consensus is static, it dies the moment it is established. In contrast, divided consensus is dynamic and persistent. it is a money making machine.
8. IV 2016
No change can happen without making serious concessions to those whose wrongdoings that change is supposed to correct. Every change is one step forward and two steps back. The system absorbs the change and mutates (like a virus), and emerges stronger and more resistant. Change triggers a quicksand effect. So, change is impossible. For things to change the system has to self-destruct.
6.IV 2016
Depression is an illness of responsibility dominated by a feeling of inadequacy. A frustrated hyper-excitement leads to a disinvestment of libidinal energy. Depression is reflected in reduction of capacity for empathy: we cannot tolerate the presence of suffering — it hurts our insensitivity.
notesfromdisgraceland 