Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Dear America (Freedom from Desire)

Dear American citizen, what makes you a part of this great nation we call the United States? What part of your being do you sacrifice to ensure this great Capitalist machine perpetually churns ad infinitum? Or are you an individual par excellance? a model American due to your perpetual indifference and ignorance of the issue at hand? Is the standard of the American ideal the absence of the government altogether? Are you only all too happy to slave off all responsibility of conscious effort to be perpetually driven to the polls with the spoon fed ideals of Freedom, Democracy and progressive promises of Rights you didn’t even know you possess, or better, didn’t even know you desired? Are you even aware the great nation you call yourself proud to be a part of is in the midst of war? The most repressive, intolerable war far beyond the imaginary devastation enacted in physical violence, the battlefield is all around, underneath your very feet and yet far off in another world. We few who recognize the struggle popularized and masquerading in the semblance of the war in the Middle East, the very violence perpetuated and made into a great cause for the ideals that the masters bombard upon our most personal, exploitable recess of the thinking mind; in this we see the symbolic struggle for human desire.
What do we desire more than anything as human subjects in the highly advanced and forever evolving awe inspiring pinnacle of western civilization we call home? Are we only all too happy with a stable job and roof under our heads with the occasional exotic trip to the movie theater, local restaurant or bar? We might say here that the war we fight is for desire itself. We are losing comrades. “Well,” you tell me, “it’s not so bad, we’ve fought for and won civil rights for all peoples, marriage equality is garnering support, and there is even talk of legalizing marijuana!” Well sir, there are numerous achievements in this great nation such as the abolition of slavery, the right to vote for all, etc. but are these at the heart of the issue? Or can we only see the cyclical pattern of suppressing authentic desire in the highly dynamic political apparatus that guarantees us our enjoyment? Is not the executor of our rights the same force that tells us to enjoy all our glorious freedoms? Well I say that the most fundamental human characteristic is to refuse any given for an intuitive, transcendental ideal of mankind! When was gay marriage or drug use even a thing to be refused to people in the first place? When, if not with the instantiation of the law, was the desire to marry issued forth in the first place? What, during this country’s profound showing of the egalitarian spirit, were the issues at hand? civil rights and anti-war solidarity. Can we not see that the nation thrives on these very moments? Events conceived in their time as general anarchy and chaos? Can we not see some of the truly greatest American souls to be in the persons of MLK, Jr. or Malcolm X? Or can we see, even, a darker side of this process that is only all too easily exploited in the so-called democratic process? For in the age of manufacturing consent (it’s an investigation by one of today’s most empirically minded souls for Gods sake!) the nation's elected officials are now null and void. The fundamental Voting Rights Act was recently ruled by the holiest of courts as no longer relevant to today’s society that now recognizes all individuals as equal: save for a few million immigrants, hundreds of victims of police violence, and the peoples enslaved to the swelling prison systems. They can’t vote anyway right? For only true citizens have the right to vote. But what is a right if not something that can’t be taken away? Are we a privileged society then if not a society of rights? Aren’t privileges something to be fought for and then taken away?         
Maybe in this age of a dead god the only sovereign entity left to look to is a just as capricious government imbued with the almost divine presence of the seat of the president: the cultural ambassador to the peoples. Is he not our god, the entity that guarantees hope, inspires change, solves our problems: the entity we pray to? And is he not just as much the authority we blame for our problems like the God in the book of Job? In this war on desire the mind is the battleground, and what constitutes our mind more than the continual narrative and thoughts that explain our every-day life? The republican gods penetrate our minds with their phallic signifiers, addressing you the well to do, conservative, middle class corporate worker! He tells you the migrants are ruining this country; what? well god damn, I want immigration reform! The democrats want to take away your constitutional rights! Well god damn, I want more guns! What else could I possibly desire? Tell me, tell me! In a hedonistic world of gratisfaction and all possible fulfillment of animal desire, a human comes to desire desire itself. In this human, all too human world of nihilistic possessions, we are desiring machines. And what is the most pathetic desire of this the modern man? The continual ego stroke from his divine authority of the corporate masters who simultaneously tells him what he desires and tells him his suffering means something: all for the greater good of America! "Your one and only son died fighting the war? Well he died for Freedom! For the ideal of Democracy! Better yet, he died fighting for your Freedom citizen! so enjoy it!" Who else died for the good of the people? On a cross? His teachings bastardized for the control of the peoples of the Holy Roman Empire? Aren’t we beyond being told our suffering has a meaning for a higher glory? Aren’t we, as American citizens, beyond being controlled, manipulated and systematically lied to? We all know that the politicians don’t serve us, but are filling a void formed from the structure of global capitalism that dominates the human world today. Perhaps we know it all too well, but the false passions of the other keep us absorbed in a false individualism borderlining on solipsism. Can’t we project a higher standard of individualism? An individualism not of selfishness, but of a individualism for all? A radical, egalitarian showing of solidarity that each and every individual can feel and control himself? Perhaps we know too much today and don’t feel enough where in a world of historical action limited to the contrived vote for superfluous ‘rights’ that should never have been an issue in the first place and merely serve to enslave us to the desire of the Other, the divine executor of capital, that controls our true passion, we should instead seek a self knowledge more true than any finely crafted rhetoric telling us what we want, a knowledge of our own desire. It might be a naive world view but, how hard is it to imagine happiness in a life lived amongst peoples you love and a peaceful world free of meaningless violence? We desire this, and nothing else. We prefer not to desire the positions of servitude expected of us embodied in the office cubicle, crunching numbers for the profit of the masters; we prefer not to desire money based off the economy of debt: burdensome, terrifying debt for an ‘education’ we too do not desire. We cannot rationalize our understanding: we only commit to a polite refusal grounded on a freedom from desire, a feeling that is necessarily discarded upon entrance into the discourse of the masters, the rhetoric which dominates the very fabric of every-day reality.


-Nothing in Color

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Freedom-toward-death


The apparent innateness, a priori nature and holiness of consciousness is to be re-examined here, or at least developed in a way to be able to pose an answer to the mysteriousness ascribed to this entity in modern, scientific discourse. Let’s imagine some primordial life conditions of thrown-in-the-world-ness where some molecules come together and form a concentrated self or cell: an environment in its, of its environment, which precisely is the same one it came from and is. These chemical conditions that manifest act on the cell and the chemical conditions in the cell respond and act on that environment, thus comes the world as such: that thing as outside and that shapes its self. The essential movement for the world to exist, in its bare, minimal state, is the cell to be identified as in its-self. But these initial primitive cells find themselves in a certain gap-to-be-filled, which I parallel with a very same gap where creativity fills in the human condition: the condition, the one universal law some call God, such as Spinoza. So then, the primordial cell came to reproduce itself as between its world and the environment, in doing so it practically creates its own world: its-self. This world is how it shapes its own identity as through the molecules available to it from its environment, which includes its-self as composed of the same chemical constituents. In the same way, we identify in our bodies the same primitive being which all objects possess insofar as they exist. For these same primordial conditions are not primarily found millions of years ago, but are here and now where life is continually being created in the same way, in this very moment as I put ink to paper, when a note emits from a violin, when a baby cries; the formation of life did not happen in a single cell long ago but necessarily always-already-is. What we call the gap-to-be-filled is the answer to the so-called origins of life where confronting this very gap contains its own answer. The very same primordial conditions occur in which it is automatically filled in by the unconscious, if not we consciously close it. When the primordial cell forms it creates an artificiality of self-ness and the laws of nature (its unconscious) filled in the gaps for the cell (the gap of seeing itself in its world, it is the world it came from, like two mirrors facing each other) by reproducing itself in copies and through storage in molecules in its artificial, self environment. Currently the largest cell we know, and can know is the universe, which came from the big bang: the ‘origin’ of its life. A curious matter is in the scientists studying the smallest particles for such a grand event but the point is at even the largest space-time scale (and thus lowest) we can only conceive of our own spontaneous life event. On all these scales life is only formed in (pre)conditions of death: the primary constituent of the unconscious. The universe is set to reach its zero-level of entropy and ordering knowledge in its only tool of matter (the world) is its recourse when the laws of nature command death. DNA, planets, buildings, computers, 1’s and 0’s are all reproductions of their respective wholes. This necessary condition for life is called freedom, that is, the realization and appropriation of death that characterizes the creative act. The necessary conditions of Dasein are being-in-the-world and freedom says Heidegger. The conscious-creative-act in the human who recognizes death creates a symbol in his world to reappropriate himself. In this act a doubling of sorts happens in the psyche, precisely only in the conscious-creative-act, where life again is formed: the very same primordial conditions that always-already-were. This is the transcendental realm of Kant where space and time are of the pure intuition. Death is held up in this realm and with every act appropriated as a last attempt to reproduce its-self in its material world that it is before the horizon of the zero-level. Descartes identified a new realm of life, a new primordial cell for analysis: the cogito, with its environment the body. The gap between mind and body was only a novel description for the very same void that characterizes the life always-already-there. However, the laws of nature, the unconscious, God commands a reproduction of self in face of the void: which, precisely is the universal solution to freedom. For Deleuze, the solution is the repetition of the same act as always a pure difference. For philosophy, the number one problem is what to do with freedom engendered from self-conscious Dasein that is being-in-the-world and free.
In modern society, working solely for the basic sustenance of your physical body is the every-day comportment toward being. Since the realization of truth for Dasein is only found in its relation to its objects and founding its own Being in said objects, the realization of its Being is that of its physical body as object, that is, being no different than a chair. A chair is undead because it does not realize its own finitude. Since Dasein cannot ever know death through its physical-object-body, in its comportment toward being (being of objects as for its material continuity) it acts as though it will never die. Dasein’s primary mode in this capitalist society is that of being-present-at-hand, where in the mere appearance of objects as just being present comes the primitive, eternal nature of cold, sterile being as mere existence: Dasein as un-dead. Only in Dasein’s freely accepting its own finitude can its comportment toward reality be that of being-toward-death. In this mode Dasein’s relation to objects is constituted in its finitude and the realization of Being is that of death: freedom-toward-death. In this mode Dasein is fundamentally opposed to the primitive being in objects such as chairs, it negates things and becomes no thing, no-thing, nothing. This is opposed to the un-dead nature of the subject of Dasein today.
What we are in now, the predominate logic of every-day life that is, Fredric Jameson names the postmodern: the logic of capitalism that pervades the discourses of politics, school, the workplace, film narratives, etc. Or, we can name this the logic of the Lacanian big Other, the entity which guarantees proper communication and understanding between two modern individuals partaking in dialogue. The minimal requirement of dialogue is this deferral of meaning to a symbolic third party and is what Lacan calls castration. This undifferentiated location in the field of symbols that we call language is the subject, with our varying location always already determined. The defining characteristic of the subject is a lack, always already there and never to be filled in. These are the two requirements for the movement of desire (freedom for Lacan). This characterizes the structure of freedom as we carry it out today. How did the modern psyche develop into this machine of desire, all too willing to accept the given norms of society? what Deleuze names the ‘society of control’? In his Philosophy of History, G. W. F. Hegel defines the course of human history as toward a realization of freedom. The whole history of wars, technology, discourse, language, writing, politics has been toward a structure, in material reality, of the gap of the subject: his freedom. Freedom is realized in the very gap constitutive of the human constructs of society as carried out by nations and their peoples. Paradoxically, the opening of these vary structures opens a chaos of unmediated freedom, these are the paradigmatic historical points in history defined by revolutions, riots and general chaos. The general coordinates of this program is the world, defined by Heidegger, as the very one we are ‘thrown’ into the day we are born. The subsequent castration through language is the essential component to establishing the free subject and negating the primordial, pre-ontological abyss of the primitive mind, that of the primordial, un-dead cell of sterile repetition. This lack through castration is the defining characteristic of modern man. What we call human life needs to step first through the death of the primordial nature into which we are born, thus negating the un-dead (negation of negation) nature of the sterile material world and becoming self-conscious. This self-consciousness is found only in the face of the lack of its subject, or in death. Which is why in the structure of science that has as its pre-ontological limit a ‘meaning to life’ we always see the new atheists such as Dawkins proscribing science as a replacement for religion on this very thesis. The very limit of religion and the limit of science are two ‘regional ontologies’ of the same essential features of human Dasein: that being which is in the world and free. The founding of the cogito of Descartes is the founding of the general reference to the world of the subject. The thinking being, through its language is the constant grounding of cognition in the modern society.
The origin of the western civilization that dominates world culture today is the Greek state of Athens, the birthplace of the Philosopher-King Plato. The goal of his Socratic dialogues is a reframing of the Athenian subject to fit into the Republic through remapping the thinking substrate of the cogito. The goal is an aporia, a simulated opening of the coordinates of the mind to a primordial abyss of radical, paralyzing freedom where the subjects only recourse is the subsequent positive closing of reading into the dialogue and seeking a limit to reinstantiate a freedom that the subject is comfortable with: a material instantiation of culture that guides a free process of every-day life as pure difference and repetition. The same process is what guides the desires of the un-dead, postmodern man where he seeks external guidance in the big Other and freely chooses his commodities, sexuality, place of employment or where he lives. However, the free process of instantiating the very limits of his freedom is the true form of radical freedom, or the notion of Freedom in Hegel. In Hegel, the gap from one limit to the next is the end of history, for afterward the reading of history hitherto is a retroactive re-reading of all past events into a necessary culmination into the current mode of freedom. This radical freedom is precisely the difference between the cold, sterile, un-dead nature of being today and the potential of being-toward-death. Radical freedom today would look something like a democratic process of opening up and changing the pre-ontological horizon of our limits and subsequent freedom of the every-day repetitive routine of being in society. The difference is between a life as mere material existence found in our comportment as rational scientific beings who see the world as a being to be exploited for human progress, and a life characterized, through death, as constant admiration, adoration of the miracle of existence of pure presence or the aesthetic of the Being of beings. The value of art in unveiling truth for the later Heidegger is essential, for the founding of truth through art, not science, is in letting nature be in its aletheia, and stopping the path of exploitation that threatens the world of capitalistic rationality seen in the scientific discourse.
From here on, Dasein’s comportment toward beings presupposes its own finitude, and further engagement in objects in the world attempts to appropriate a no-thing characteristic of its freedom-toward-death: it cannot appropriate its Being. Here resides the fundamental lesson in Hegel where in attempting to instantiate the ideal onto the world necessarily ends in failure to realize the intended outcome; you can only come to recognize the correct act through reconciliation of the wrong act first: this is Hegelian infinite negativity, or negation of the negation, or absolute knowledge. This Hegelian system in terms of Heidegger, where the problems (contradictions) within the context of said system, with all of its presupposed axioms, always-already hold its own solution: Identification [Freud] of the problem holds its own solution. Which is precisely why capitalism engenders its contradictions in the context of its own solutions to the problem: all the political charades are merely appearances for the big Other, when in reality the problem already was always resolved before its material manifestation and the fundamental ideals of capitalism remain unchanged.
The castration of the subject required to enter into the discourse of the Other, Lacan recognizes as the death conceptualized in Heidegger. This symbolic castration represents the no-thing of Dasein and takes away the freedom-toward-death needed in its Identification. This is why true atheism requires the death of the big Other and the discourse of science cannot answer the question of life, being, consciousness. To engage in the discourse necessarily requires you to give up your death, castrate yourself and recognize it in the Other. Authentic Being is in direct identification with your self as the master, following the logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. This characterizes Heidegger’s classification between science and philosophy: only philosophy can probe the pre-ontological abyss characterizing the mystery of Being. This authentic part of ourselves, this desire is castrated when engaging in the postmodern logic of capital, culture and every-day life itself. This is why Heidegger recommends we spend more time in graveyards: only in direct, immediate identification with our own death can we come to know true Freedom. The closest we can get to the realization of truth is in the unveiling of being (aletheia for Heidegger) with the deployment of the essence of mind: the faculty of Understanding for Hegel. This is the absolute power of consciousness carried out by Understanding that reveals the pre-ontological abyss and sets the limits of freedom for self:

The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar. To break an idea up into its original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea, but rather constitute the immediate property of the self. This analysis, to be sure, only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar, fixed, and inert determinations. But what is thus separated and non-actual is an essential moment; for it is only because the concrete does divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual, that it is self-moving. The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom -- this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that maintains it and endures itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or it is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking at the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinations an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.1

- Nothing in Color
____________________________________
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977 pps. 18-19.

Monday, March 23, 2015

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

Sunday, February 22, 2015

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

Friday, February 13, 2015

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