Toward a New Ethic of Ordinary-Life

Where is the soul located in modern society today? We posit the soul as that omnispatial, omnitemporal (non)entity which reveals itself only retroactively through our finite understanding of space-time [the Deleuzian Sense-Event]. In the scope of humanity, the soul is located in great works of art of the past, or in more personal terms in daily acts of creativity on the individual level. However, the main question should concern the gap between reality as such and the recognition of the authentic creative act: more precisely, the gap between the mind and soul. For today, when members of ISIS know their acts are made in the name of God, which is a realm of mind, the more precise definition of the soul is the belief in God in a more Kierkegaardian way, where the believer is plagued with self-doubt. This gap is known better, in psychoanalytic terms, as the unconscious: the realm of our symbolic language we are thrown into and come to (unconsciously) know in order to interact in the intersubjective world: otherwise known as language. For, as Lacan has noted, we do not speak language but language speaks us. We are concerned here with the structure of language in the form of dialectics. For example, theory (as it is now known as in the humanities departments) is the creation of abstract concepts in concrete writing for subsequent passage into the conceptual realm of (an)others mind and thus creation multiplied through the other: this is, precisely, intersubjectivity at its purest. So, then, this gap is today exploited in capitalism and keeps people (un)dead, but life is in its purest form when integrated directly into intersubjectivity without a big Other. The self is presented with, in today’s society, bombarded with a multitude of self-constituting options. Even, the imperative of the superego commands you to enjoy all the ways of self-constitution made available to us: this is the source of the pressure for meaning in every-day life. (As an aside, we can see the role of the big Other in the creative process through the abstract carrying out of the form of Justice in the case of the Marvin Gaye estate vs. Pharrell Williams et. al. Perhaps a more authentic form of justice would be a mass movement to boycott the song in question through a collective, intersubjective form of understanding.)

The pressure for meaning has its limitations, and subsequently its roots in the form of Desire (of the big Other), for Desire is by definition insatiable. As outlined by Freud, with the birth of civilization and subsequent instantiation of the law comes the desire to break said law as well, thus sets in motion the void of Desire. This unattainable ideal, manifested in the ruling ethico-political ideologies of voting, charity, and love is the predominate form of control in this globally integrated form of capitalism today. So, where then do we find the soul in the integrated social fabric of reality? Falsely presented, maybe, in a simulated form of intersubjectivity with origins in what Baudrillard calls the hypermarket. In this globalized society, the intersubjective world is dominated by consumerist ideology with direct correlation to, and origins in the global market of capital. Money seeps into the everyday and puts a value on everything: an alienating value in purely rational terms of a productive and socio-economic basis. Postmodern culture today has a high value, with pop-stars making millions, where the investments pay off by blurring any real form of intersubjectivity with hyper-real simulations: life in the movies/tv is more real than everyday life. Also, in the hypermarket the lines between subject and object become blurred in the entity of the commodity, where the consumer enters the market with his/her abstract money and attempts find meaning in society through the valuation of the object. “More money, more problems;” with anxieties and the search for the self in a society founded upon the decentered self, the consumer (fueled with the images of postmodern culture) seeks out the market to symbolically exchange his/her abstract money for objects. Objects, in the form of commodities, takes up the space of Desire only temporally. The crux of the top earning western corporations is the always devalued commodity with the next updated version creating consumer Desire: mostly seen in electronics where, for example, Apple purposely keeps technological innovations on the back-burner for the next generation iPhone. With Apple we can also see the effective marketing in the purchase of self-identity: with advertisements of hip, multicultural college students you are effectively buying the ideal of Western, Liberal Capitalism and the pre-determined role you play in said society. With the death of Steve Jobs we saw a veneration of these exploiting masterminds and another way to commodify the self in purchasing autobiographies, tweeting thoughts of remorse and identifying with the ideal entrepreneur/capitalist as the role-models in society.

Looking beyond Marx here, we can see the potential for a new site of emancipation previously in manual labour at the sites of the production process. With technological advances, and the more or less machinic manufacturing of commodities (I’d argue the exploited children/peoples in developing countries exploited today are kept more or less in the machinic state) the new site of liberation is in the hypermarket: boycotting superfluous goods or buying used goods could effectively cripple the economy of the corporate masters. With the superego command to obey and enjoy your commodity we see the societal role of the indiscrete subversion entailed with said command embodied in the Black Friday holiday sales rush. Dissent and disillusionment of the consumerist ideology has its function precisely in this mass, hysterical outburst of subversion where the consumer feels like he/she has somehow gained an edge and gamed the system. We, however, call for an authentic ethico-political act of Bartleby the scrivener1 and would “prefer not to” engage in the overconsumption that threatens the very material world we live in. For with the ambiguity in the hypermarket where the lines between consumption and production are blurred, we ultimately consume beyond the basic needs of survival: we always over-work for attainment and fulfillment of a Desire of the self as inundated upon us by postmodern culture. So, we politely say that we would “prefer not to” engage in a society left to us, and predominantly controlled by the ideals set by the baby boomer generation.

We still have yet to locate the soul of modern man. We claim the modern man is soul-less when he/she assigns his/her meaning through this postmodern culture of the big Other: thus, Nietzsche was the prophet of this global nihilism. We still see the predominancy of the dead god in the christian faith in western developed nations as a trade-off for the burden of a radical freedom needed in today’s society to confront the horrors of the world. This freedom is found in a self-identifying ethic in direct confrontation with the meaninglessness of these horrors caused by globalization, with the soul founded in the intersubjectivity of the affirmation of life (through death, via Heidegger) instead of the path of society toward self-destruction. The economic freedoms of the homeless should be venerated not taken to combat in the ‘war on poverty’. Some nostalgia is held for a former time when Alexander the Great himself engaged with the poor old philosopher Diogenes. For what if the political leaders of today took the time to engage with the homeless? We should start our engagement of our new ethic precisely in these daily events of ordinary-life: the contemplative life of the economically free, contemplative lifestyle should be venerated and we would “prefer not to” be mind-controlled desiring machines of the neo-liberal agenda which only sees profits for the few elites at top.

    -Nothing in Color

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1. See Zizek, Slavoj Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006 for more detailed account of “Bartleby-politics”.

God and Money

What does it mean, in modern times, to engage in the everyday, common-place of life? I mean here, precisely, the western, liberal, democratic ideal of life that the powers that be are transforming the human race into today. The new world order or the end-point of history as outlined by Francis Fukuyama perpetuates the neo-liberal agenda that restricts our economic (un)freedoms to the safety and security of the forty-hour work week that today has become a privilege to a new, co-dependent brand of the middle class. What keeps the people asleep to the horrors of the ruling ideologies while only a few come to be awaken to the resulting destruction that lies all around us?

The antagonisms of capitalism can today be seen in proxies of war in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, North Korea, Africa, Greece, Libya, etc. Precisely where groups of people awaken to the monstrosities of the new world order and stand up to fight there breaks out mass acts of violence. I don’t just mean here physical acts of violence, but political violence as well: Greece being the primary example here. The new ruling party of Greece is doing violence to the typical ideological notion of a sort of Kantian duty to fiscal responsibility called austerity. Immediately following this resistance Obama announced his new budget proposal pledging to cut ‘mindless austerity’ and put trillions into social funding. Let’s analyze this strategic move by the most powerful man in the West. We all know that a budget proposal citing ‘mindless austerity’ and trillions for public spending will never see the light of day with the fiscally responsible conservatives holding the legislative branch. So why make an announcement like this? in direct assault to the republican rhetoric? and immediately following the success of the Greek peoples? Let’s call it a counter attack in the universal war of ideology. The leaders of the world now have no choice now but to acknowledge the impact of the neo-liberal agenda on the common-place worker in modern society, all but previously ignoring the crises in Argentina and their on-going battle with the capital rich western financial institutions. Precisely when a country of the European Union is revolting is when direct action is needed; precisely now Obama steps up to save face, with his charismatic rhetoric, and redeem the financial institutions he represents. This victory in Greece is bittersweet: we all know full well, the White House included, that this proposal is sheer talk.

Let’s analyze the republican/democratic dichotomy as it stands today, especially in keeping with the economic side of the discussion. Political pundits of all sorts following the comeback of the republicans, with their seizure of the senate, cried out “lame-duck Obama.” However, this is precisely the time to see the ruling ideology at play; the time to see where both parties align and rule out this false political dichotomy once and for all. Republicans are already aligning to renew the fast-track agreement to give the Obama administration the authority to pass more free-trade agreements he vehemently supports: TTP, TTIP, etc. Trickle down economics are alive and well, for when big business is happy the corporate media are happy: thus the people are happy. Unemployment rates are flaunted, people are back to work and happy just to be doing that. Why? the citizens are kept at minimal life and live pay-check to pay-check and only when business is booming and capital is expanding is when the workers see a slice of the pie. When most people are kept worrying about foreclosure and paying mortgages they are all to happy to work like dogs. Hard-work and sacrifice are the mottos that keep the ideal alive: from rag to riches successes keep the ideal instantiated in reality.

Here, with the unregulated expansion of capital that the free-trade deals represent, we see economic crashes as vital to the whole process. Too much money and luxury promotes free-thinking while economic disparity promotes political subservience. The role of the financial institutions in the housing crises of 2008 precisely created this fear and trauma to keep people at bay and thankful for their own stability. Mass media inundated us with images of foreclosures and families forced to move from their family homes. Those thankful enough to keep paying the bills probably even felt a sense of entitlement due to precisely the hard-work necessary in keeping up with the payments and providing food for their family. “We must be doing something right,” “boy, our hard-work has really been paying off, better not let up now,” etc. This is where the rhetoric of the republican party, who praise the economically successful, pays off the most. As with the most recent midterms we can see precisely when the individualist, conservative and well off middle-class goes out to vote. Here, we can also see the role the radical tea-partiers play in the ‘grand ‘ol party.’ This radicalized group is a spin-off of the establishment and birthed from their rhetoric of social darwinism: they represent the republican ideology when taken to its full consequences. The conservative majority herald patriotism and love of country, we can see this in the preaching of ‘American Exceptionalism’ on Fox News, the home of the GOP. The new middle class with the images of foreclosure in their minds and feeling the most patriotic (most liable to visit the polls in the otherwise unpopular midterms) have only economic concerns at heart: or, their own well-being (big government and socialist/marxist Obama giving your hard earned money to the poor).

Where else can we see the common point of politics here in the States? the ideological war on terror. The Patriot Act, signed in the aftermath of September 11th, has been renewed on multiple occasions by the Obama administration. Why, when the key rhetorical device used to win his first election was explicitly anti-Bush? We can be even more economically cynical here and name drop the military-industrial-complex. Furthermore, we can cite the billions of dollars of defense contracts, not only domestic but also to our foreign allies: such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. Or, the major shareholdings of former Bush cabinet members: Cheney et. al. But this is just a minor kick-back the political elites enjoy as they fight their ‘war on terror’: which shall be renamed, for our purposes, the ‘war on ideologies other than the predominate ruling ideologies.’ For Marx was right when he said, “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.” In the wake of 9/11 we saw a rallying of American pride around a horrific trauma. Thus the opportunistic state apparatus enacted a war on terror to fight their ideological enemies: we did not go to war with Saddam, we went in to rid the country of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ A strategic rhetoric to rally the masses in the wake of the mass destruction they had just witnessed in Manhattan. The previously state controlled oil in Iraq was made private, under a new Western friendly regime, to rival the neighboring Iranian economy. We can see the major impact that oil has on the world economy precisely now with oil-dependent Russian in trouble. The newest proxy is now being fought in Ukraine: completely unnecessary violence and killing for a control of power and resources. Only now the Obama administration has fought an underground war behind the mass surveillance apparatuses: wars are becoming more and more virtual as the WikiLeaks and Snowdens have been pointing out. Even more so with the political charades and images of fighting on the news being directly interpreted for our socially developed short attention spans: panels of ‘experts’ of all kinds there to give us the politically correct ways to view the nonsense killings and destruction of people livelihoods and infrastructures. It’s too hard to imagine the utter meaninglessness of the destruction so we are all too ready to accept the ruling ideological interpretations which are strictly economically motivated to serve the State backed financial institutions of the West. For as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, “capitalism is a religious phenomena,” with our new God being money and the financial institutions our churches.

-Nothing in Color

Introduction to Nothing in Color

The goal of this project in the form of a periodical blog is to posit and dissect this notion of ‘ordinary-life’. What do we mean by ordinary-life? It is precisely the apparent innocuity of this term which serves as a cause for alarm. We claim that ordinary-life is not a place, but rather a subtle worldview -- a lens through which the majority of our globalized society peers through unknowingly --  which disempowers our creative freedom, our ever-ready existential ecstasy: this radical, creative freedom which informs our constant evolution. The tacit mode of being called ordinary-life -- which no one is entirely free from --  may succinctly be described as the belief (which does not appear in the mind as a belief) that we exist in an ordinary world dominated by tedium and banality which can only be alleviated by extraordinary transience. We claim that the extraordinary does not reveal itself in fleeting episodes, but is instead an inherent, continuous quality of existence obfuscated by the idea of ordinary-life. There are no ordinary occurrences, yet we unknowingly perceive the world and ourselves through the subtle notion of the daily routine of life, in effect sapping reality of its meaning and urgency. Furthermore, this default mode of existence shapes and defines the material world and reciprocates it back to the perceiver: he perceives concrete reality as such.

We will proceed through the critique of politics, pop-culture, and the state of affairs of the world today. We will confront and dismantle this noxious world-view with constant reference to a multitude of thinkers/artists in the realms of philosophy, cinema, literature, history, art, etc. This will provide a material, anthropological account of the ideas of humanity that have shaped the world today and show the devastating endpoint that the current, ruling ideas are leading us toward. The way we see it now humanity is traveling on a path towards complete self-destruction. Tragically, this paradigm shift is exactly what is needed for a fundamental change. We hope -- by awakening and empowering like-minded individuals -- to disrupt this path towards total annihilation, to provoke an alternative revolutionary turning point and to redefine the course of history. Ultimately we intend to engage you, the individual reader, and dispel your fear. You are not alone: we see the horror of reality and also the potential for beauty.

-Nothing in Color