noumena

"Self-gratifying moral onanists"

[The blogger is an editor of a law journal at a large university in the American northeast, a profoundly banal publication staffed in large part by moralizing wretches of the academic left, to whom this passage from Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals (Third Essay) is emphatically addressed.]

Those people who are, from the outset, failures, oppressed, broken— they are the ones, the weakest, who most undermine life among human beings, who in the most perilous way poison and question our trust in life, in humanity, in ourselves. Where can we escape it, that downcast glance with which people carry a deep sorrow, that reversed gaze of the man originally born to fail which betrays how such a man speaks to himself—that gaze which is a sigh. “I wish I could be someone else!”— that’s what this glance sighs. “But there is no hope here. I am who I am. How could I detach myself from myself? And yet—I’ve had enough of myself!”… On such a ground of contempt for oneself, a truly swampy ground, grows every weed, every poisonous growth, and all of them so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweet. Here the worms of angry and resentful feelings swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and duplicity; here are constantly spun the nets of the most malicious conspiracies—the plotting of suffering people against the successful and victorious; here the appearance of the victor is despised. And what dishonesty not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred! What an extravagance of large words and postures, what an art of “decent” slander! These failures: what noble eloquence streams from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble resignation swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to make a show of justice, love, wisdom, superiority— that’s the ambition of these “lowest” people, these invalids! And how clever such an ambition makes people! For let’s admire the skilful counterfeiting with which people here imitate the trademarks of virtue, even its resounding tinkle, the golden sound of virtue. They have now taken a lease on virtue entirely for themselves, these weak and hopeless invalids—there’s no doubt about that: “We alone are the good men, the just men”—that’s how they speak: “We alone are the homines bonae voluntatis [men of good will].” They wander around among us like personifications of reproach, like warnings to us—as if health, success, strength, pride, and a feeling of power were already inherently depraved things, for which people must atone some day, atone bitterly. O how ready they themselves basically are to make people atone, how they thirst to be hangmen! Among them there are plenty of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word “Justice” in their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their mouths always pursed, always ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and goes on its way in good spirits. Among them there is no lack of that most disgusting species of vain people, the lying monsters who aim to present themselves as “beautiful souls” and to hawk about their ruined sensuality, dressed up in poetry and other swaddling clothes, as “purity of heart”: the species of self-gratifying moral onanists. The desire of sick people to present some form or other of superiority, their instinct for secret paths leading to a tyranny over the healthy—where can we not find it, this very will to power of the weakest people! The sick woman, in particular: no one outdoes her in refined ways to rule others, to exert pressure, to tyrannize. For that purpose, the sick woman spares nothing living or dead. She digs up again the most deeply buried things (the Bogos say “The woman is a hyena”). Take a look into the background of every family, every corporation, every community: everywhere you see the struggle of the sick against the healthy—a quiet struggle, for the most part, with a little poison powder, with needling, with deceitful expressions of long suffering, but now and then also with that sick man’s Pharisaic tactic of loud gestures, whose favourite role is “noble indignation.” It likes to make itself heard all the way into the consecrated rooms of science, that hoarse, booming indignation of the pathologically ill hound, the biting insincerity and rage of such “noble” Pharisees. … They are all men of ressentiment, these physiologically impaired and worm-eaten men, a totally quivering earthly kingdom of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in its outbursts against the fortunate, and equally in its masquerades of revenge, its pretexts for revenge. When would they truly attain their ultimate, most refined, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they could succeed in pushing their own wretchedness, all misery in general, into the consciences of the fortunate, so that the latter one day might begin to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps would say to themselves, “It’s  shameful to be fortunate. There’s too much misery!”… But there could be no greater and more fateful misunderstanding than if, through this process, the fortunate, the successful, the powerful in body and spirit should start to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this “twisted world”! Away with this disgraceful softening of feelings! That the invalids do not make the healthy sick—and that would be such a softening—that should surely be ruling point of view on earth:—but that would require above everything that the healthy remain separated from the sick, protected even from the gaze of sick people, so that they don’t confuse themselves with the ill… . Their right to exist, the privilege of a bell with a perfect ring in comparison to one that is cracked and off key, is indeed a thousand times greater. They alone are the guarantors of the future; they alone stand as pledge for humanity’s future. Whatever they can do, whatever they should do—the sick can never do and should not do… . And therefore let’s have fresh air! fresh air! In any case, let’s keep away from the neighbourhood of all cultural insane asylums and hospitals! And for that let’s have good companionship, our companionship! Or loneliness, if that’s necessary! But by all means let’s stay away from the foul stink of inner rotting and of the secret muck from sick worms! In that way, my friends, we can defend ourselves, at least for a while, against the two nastiest scourges which may be lying in wait precisely for us—against a great disgust with humanity and against a great pity for humanity!

Unconcerned, contemptuous, violent - this is how wisdom would have us be: she is a woman, she only ever loves a warrior.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

The glass panopticon

In the future everything you ever did online will be knowable. Even today the majority of what you have read, researched, written in emails and instant messages, watched, browsed, etc. can be reconstructed by forensic computer scientists, unless you have made use of anonymous browsing and similar technologies - technologies whose power to conceal will be trivial in the future. If future technicians were unable to trace, excavate, sort, and read all of your online activities, that would be a departure from the general trend of what is called progress. It would be surprising.

In time people will come to learn that the internet is a glass panopticon where privacy not only does not exist but in principle cannot exist. They will adapt their behavior correspondingly. Our generation, unique in having lived through the genesis of the internet, will have all its online deeds exposed and discoverable to future governments, historians, and hobbyists in a way that will come to be seen as naive or quaint. If you are famous, you should expect, at a minimum, that within a generation of your death every email you have ever written will be publicly available.

This prediction is based on the axiom that if a thing can be done, eventually it will be done. This is the antidote to the conceit of human control over technological advance, for it lays bare the one and only variable doing any work in the function of technology. While exogenous factors - including, to a limited extent, the policies of nations - have the ability to propel or retard technological advances, and while there always exists the possibility of human extinction, which would put a decisive end to “intelligent design”, only one factor is direction-determining: the power to exist. In this sense, technological progress is much like evolution by natural selection: myopic, inexorable, and, above all, perilous to that which preexists.

Expectation value of the social contract

For every person the value of living within organized society can be determined and quantified in monetary terms. Call this amount the expectation value of the social contract.

To determine what the social contract is worth to a given individual, use a thought experiment: You are at the jewelry counter of a large department store. The attendant has accidentally left a jewel sitting out and turned her back on it. You can easily pocket the jewel and leave unnoticed. However, the department store is monitored by cameras. Do you take it and leave?

Some people will answer with an unconditional yes; others with an unconditional no. But most answers will change depending on the value of the jewel. To the person who gives an unconditional no, ask: what if it were worth a million dollars? Still no? Ten million then. Twenty million? Eventually this principled person will have to concede he would take a million-dollar, billion-dollar, or ten-billion-dollar jewel. Conversely, even those people who claim they would take any unattended jewel would eventually decline to do so as the hypothesized value declines: the most reckless scofflaw cannot be troubled with a ten-cent crystal.

Call the value at which A’s answer changes from a yes to a no X. It follows that X is the value that A attaches to society. This is not only because A trades the benefits of living in peace within a system of bureaucracies for X dollars and being pursued by the police apparatus, living in hiding, unable to avail himself of formal institutions, but also because it is the compensatory amount required for A to renounce the status of law-abiding citizen. That is, X = (benefits of social institutions) + (law-abiding self-regard) - (inconvenience of police pursuit).

Ex hypothesi, the wealthier A is, the higher X must be, partly due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. But my point here is to suggest something about the poor, putting aside the artificial jewelry scenario. A person who steals a car radio, or a can of beer from a bodega, should not be described as antisocial, stupidly or selfishly disregarding the commands of authority needed to organize mass society to everyone’s benefit including his own, or as determined to take the benefits of civilization without paying his fair share of forbearance from immediate impulses, because for every A, rich or poor, there is an X. The better explanation is that to the poor man, society is worth less. He gets no benefits from social institutions that distribute resources, power, and privilege; concomitantly, he regards law-abidance as hypocrisy and takes no pride in its observance; and to a large extent his life is already characterized by police pursuit.

In simple terms, for a large number of Americans, X —> 0.

The ugly world

The most salient feature of the modern world is that it is so ugly. Everywhere in that zone of the earth’s surface that excludes only, on the one hand, the few remaining patches of pristine wilderness and, at the opposite extreme, a few preserved towns and historical city centers, the planet is locked down by a monstrous mechanical web of roads, tracks, cables, wires, pipes, concrete, walls, tracts of ravaged land, dead drainage channels, and, everywhere these things intersect, vast jumbled clusters of mass-produced dwelling-places, lighted from the inside by electric boxes flickering with evil images and hysterical noise.

The ugliness that surrounds and suffocates us is a relatively new development. In the past, our ancestors, no matter how acute their privations, however calamitous their fates, dwelt in a world of perfect and perfectly integrated beauty. Universal ugliness arises principally from historical developments, all second-order consequences of the spirit of gluttony:

First, mass production: The systematic production of identical commodities has filled the world with crude, inapposite shapes that would sit brutally against their environment were it not comprised, for the most part, of other mass-produced commodities, from the soda can in a woman’s hand to the massive slabs of concrete holding up skyscrapers and everything in between. Our world is constructed almost entirely from artificial pieces manufactured in far off places and shipped great distances to be assembled not by craftsmen but by mechanical laborers into stark, linear, and haphazard edifices. In older times even the laziest builder could not help but imbue into his works a specificity, a tailor-fit, an appropriateness and adaptation, however rude, to the place or task for which it was meant. The annihilation in all things of this inherent intelligence has made the world chaotic, disorienting, alienatating, and, above all, ugly. Mass production has also made possible the disposable consumer commodities whose packaging and cast-off, used-up remains comprise most of the garbage that litters our streets and overflows in stinking landfills. In the past, a rude hovel constructed by hand, however pathetic, however badly it wanted to be ugly, it could not be ugly as tract housing, or a cul-de-sac of McMansions against a prairie. Likewise, garbage of the past was simply compost, merging back into nature within days. Mass production of plastics makes garbage permanent.

Second, the automobile. I have never seen a car that, if considered on its own merits, strictly as a solitary physical object, denuded of suggestions of technological power inculcated in its design by advertising, did not appear hideously ugly, not to mention loud, smelly, and filth-spewing. More drastically, the highway system at present is the most pervasive form of modern ugliness: its inhuman contours and uncouth system of insistent neon lines and garish symbols cuts across the natural landscape as violently and as hatefully as a razor slash across a woman’s face. Its tangled webs of concrete, glass, and steel, suffused with the stench of burning petroleum, are the very vertebrae of the monstrosities we have constructed as if in perverse tribute to some grotesque antidiety, for the material world as we find it is incapable of generating ugliness. Like torture, ugliness had to be dreamed up by men.

Third, advertising. This hardly requires explanation. Advertising is more directly implicated in the systemic stupidity of the modern world, the second most pressing problem, just behind ugliness, but undoubtedly contributes not only a substantial volume of the general store of ugliness but also some of its most unmitigated examples. Unlike mass production and the automobile, advertising could not conceivably be retained by a good society. This is because the tendency of beautiful things is to integrate, flow into, harmoniously adapt to and reflect their surroundings, while the imperative of the advertisement is to flout, repudiate, and so to devalue its surroundings by violently drawing attention to itself: the advertisement cannot abide harmony.

We should declare war on these things and destroy them by force. We should not seek to explain why this should be done or recruit or proselytize. A human being worthy of the privilege of existence will see the destruction of the factory, the car, and the advertisement and exult with all his spirit, as it were precognitively. The wreckage itself should also be destroyed or recycled, that the nightmare of the 20th century be obscured forever. Then we can begin anew the project of building a world befitting our genius and tailored to our limitations, a world where we are surrounded at all times by totally integrated and infinitely varied beauty, just as nature is, and where such beauty is a common good, as necessary to wellbeing as good food, sleep, and companionship.

Le mépris ("Contempt")

Bernard Stiegler, translated from the French:

The European Union and its Commission once again faced the affront of a wholehearted rejection in the recent elections. This time more disastrous than ever, as if the “construction of Europe” that it claims to embody, can only lead to the destruction of democratic life, and produce bitterness and distrust among Europeans concerning what they recognise not as Europe but, on the contrary, as the organisation of its disrepute, both at home and abroad.

Following the collapse of Fordian consumerism witnessed during the crisis of 2008, it is clear that we are, more than ever, in urgent need of European cooperation, in particular with America and Asia, to invent a new industrial model capable of overcoming the genuinely catastrophic situation into which the whole of humanity has been plunged by what can only be referred to as a reign of systemic stupidity. This new industrial model must give rise to a new lifestyle, a new culture.

The systemic stupidity that this new culture must now combat was born of and dominated by the hegemony of marketing of which the so-called cultural industries were the secular arm: obeying only the imperatives of consumerism, they slowly but surely destroyed culture – and in doing so they systemised the reign of stupidity by clouding minds and discrediting the institutions responsible for their growth. In this context, what we have called the “democratisation of culture” since the time of Malraux has been overturned and broken down into cultural consumerism.

If the consumerist model was founded on the functional opposition of producers and consumers, the model is dead and cultural consumerism with it. With the fall of Fordism and the major metal industries which adopted it and dominated the 20th century, the cultural industries which gave culture the role of organising consumption – destroying the public and transforming it into audiences – have also fallen. It is sad that Michel Piccoli, whose despised character so very clearly embodies this question in Le Mépris, was so little aware of it – he, Juliette Greco and others who have fully – not to say artfully – taken advantage of this system.

For the past four years, Ars Industrialis has asserted that this model, which has given rise to so much contempt, is no longer tenable and that a different organisation of the industrial economy is possible: what we call the economy of contribution, based on the characteristics of digital technology networks where the functional pairing of production and consumption is no longer pertinent. The contributor, who is neither a consumer nor a producer, implements cognitive and cultural technologies, which together form technologies of the mind.

Clearly, there is a new social environment, which is increasingly pervaded by these technologies, and currently gives rise to the appearance and proliferation of ultra-consumerist models, addictive and highly mimetic.  Marketing organises these models in a highly systematic manner, and the unprecedented potential of which it uses to control individual behaviour and manipulate groups. In other words, digital networks together with the cultural technologies and social practices that develop within them provide radically alternative possibilities:

* One possibility facilitates the development of economic and industrial relations based on personal and collective investment, shared intelligence and the creation of new spaces and critical times supported by an industrial policy of technologies of the mind which should first and foremost be a cultural policy, bringing together artists, writers, thinkers and scientists.

* The other possibility aims to nip in the bud the unprecedented potential for a new age of a life of the mind offered by cultural technologies, and to increase the power of behavioural control, of the instrumentalisation of artists, writers, thinkers and scientists and of the ultra-consumerism of culture, exacerbating systemic stupidity in the process – despite the economic catastrophe that this inflicted on the world in 2008.

It is clear that the European Union has not opted for the first possibility, even if there is nothing to prove that it has adopted the second: the Union is a complex organism which is often affected by conflicts. However, it is certain that its lack of clarity in this field as in so many others has contributed to its electoral failure. For in Europe and throughout the world, everyone now knows, either intuitively or after due consideration, that unless we witness a burst of collective intelligence, the future of the entire world is compromised, at least in the short term.  Everyone expects Europe to finally play the role that its economic and cultural power demands.  

The question of the alternative provided by digitisation has never been asked by what is referred to as the industry of knowledge, the society of wisdom, the battle of intelligence and creative economy: so much discourse which seems more interested in invoking the reality of “cognitive” or “cultural capitalism”, but which, at present is producing the exact opposite of knowledge, wisdom and creation, rather than putting an end to the reign of stupidity, this discourse is very often a direct contribution.

And not once has the question of this alternative been considered in the context of the European year of creativity and innovation 2009 as designated by the President of the European Commission. What does “creativity” mean here? There can be no doubt that, used in conjunction with the word “innovation”, it refers to the concepts of creative economy and creative class put forward by John Hawkins and Richard Florida in 2001 and 2002 respectively. The theories of Florida and Hawkins emerge against a backdrop of a managerial theory of creativity which itself is a version of the theory of innovation. Its particularity lies in its suggestion that the source of innovation is the creativity of individuals.

The entire theory of innovation was established in a consumerist framework. Nevertheless, while it was giving rise to the concept of the creative economy, new practices were developing which no longer corresponded to this consumerist model founded on the increased social connectivity of the individual, but which corresponded to a model based on contribution which highlights the individual in a collaborative model, an intrinsically social model – with what have become such well-known examples as Wikipedia, the open source world and the model of creative commons constituting the real subject of what we will call not the creative economy but the contributory society.

The total lack of vision and understanding of these objectives is one of the many factors of the failure of the European Union. It will only really exist, meaning it will only succeed in uniting its constituent countries and populations, when it proves that it has a vision of the future. This “year of creativity and innovation” should have been devoted to orienting the ongoing digitisation process, which affects every aspect of psychological and social life, towards a new industrial policy placing culture and the mind at the heart of its concerns, such as the contributory economy, against consumerism and more importantly against cultural consumerism with a view to inventing a new industrial age founded on the economy of a value more precious than any other: intelligence in the 18th century sense of the word whereby it forms the cornerstone of sociability in every form, both sensorial and intellectual.

But none of this has come to pass. And that is why the European cultural landscape will be no more mobilised than the peoples of the Union themselves in the democratic undertaking offered them. And yet, it is never too late. That is why we call on artists, writers, thinkers and scientists from throughout Europe to take action by meeting in Brussels before the end of the year to demand that culture be placed at the heart of the European Union’s project for the future and in the service of a renaissance of industrial society – of which the Europe of the Enlightenment was the historic cradle.

Veterans Day

Why do stories on soldiers suffering “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (“PTSD”) always begin with an invocation of the familiar claim that PTSD is a condition ignored, overlooked, or met with ignorant incredulity? There are weekly or at least monthly PTSD stories in every major newspaper, a great proliferation of documentaries on the subject, sympathetic radio interviews with PTSD “survivors” are commonplace, and it is inconceivable that anyone would question its classification as a “disorder” on a credible television network without incurring an overwhelming blast of spontaneous outrage from the public and the expertise elite.

The insistence of each PTSD-promoting story on denying the general prevalence of such stories demands exploration.

Could it be because soldiers returning from war, in all times and in all countries a threat to the social order, having been trained in the autonomous use of violence and having stepped outside the territory governed by the social contract to face the terror and conflict against which the state itself is constructed, are even more of a threat to today’s social order - a psychological threat?

Today’s social order is upheld not by the authoritative moral standards of theologians or philosophers, but instead - though no less rigorously - by objective, “scientific” definitions of psychiatric normalcy, enforced by allegedly non-punitive, therapeutic correction. It is an order upheld not by by propaganda commanding the subject to work hard and produce for the greater good but by a supersaturation of advertising, that is, by blasting the subject from all sides with propaganda insisting that he consume more goods and services; this is necessary when the economic system is producing far in excess of human needs and requires widespread gluttony of every sort to absorb the surplus and avert collapse. Thus one who obstinately refuses to be happy when surrounded by such surfeits of fantastic commodities and dazzling entertainment spectacles as our society insists upon is the most insidious threat of all and his deviation, his pathology, must be sussed out, analyzed, authoritatively labeled, and treated by experts.

The returning soldier is no longer dangerous on account of the technical war-making skills vested in him, but because of his potential for psychological treason against consumer capitalism. The corporate state does not deny violence. Indeed it exaggerates, promotes, fetishizes, and commoditizes violence, while the violently antisocial are easily controlled by the overwhelming force of the police apparatus, their misdeeds aggressively recorded and promoted both as spectacle entertainment (“Cops”) and to secure greater obedience by a population kept in constant awe of the state’s professional excellence in administering death and forceful control with calm, precision, and patriotic rectitude (“24”). But a state whose object is the  promotion of material comfort absolutely denies the possibility under its reign of dissatisfaction and intractable unhappiness, which must be stigmatized as medical pathologies internal to the individual who suffers from “depression”, “social anxiety disorder”, or, in the case of one who has seen clearly, on the battlefield, the existential isolation and ineluctable peril of man’s position in the cosmos, and is thereafter unimpressed by trivial titillation, “PTSD”.

Dangerous cases like these require management by the secular clergy, the news professionals. I must own up to a certain, low-frequency disquiet when I hear, on NPR for example, some veteran confessing forthrightly his struggles with PTSD, and usually how he overcame the disorder and reintegrated into society. It is not only that I believe that men for the most part are psychologically well-equipped for battle, having engaged in it for hundreds of thousands of years (excepting the kind of industrialized warfare characteristic of the total wars of the 19th century and associated conflicts, which Iraq fortunately fails to compare to in extremity of violence), while no man of a sensitive disposition can withstand the viciousness of consumerism without crippling spiritual degradation. More immediately, I feel the unease and contempt of one witnessing a poor “sinner” confessing his “sins” to a priest whose supposed benevolence and disinterest cloaks a spurious claim to power and authority, and enlists the sinner’s own conscience in the oppression of himself.

Sartre: “I hate victims who respect their executioners.”

Briefly noted

“Weight diversity” advocates urge “fat acceptance”, the notion that the majority of Americans who have grossly distorted and ailing bodies due to consuming far more food than the human organism can make use of, at great cost to their own health and at great cost to lean insurance policy holders who effectively subsidize fat policy holders, and to the great profit of the processed food industry, the weight loss industry, and the health care industry, should have their excessive consumption immunized from criticism on personal-identity grounds, substantiating arguments previously made on this site in which attention was directed to commonalities in that distinct value system based around “diversity”, sanctity of personal identity, relativistic normativity, and respect for “choice”, and the value system of consumerism more generally: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08fat.html?hp

Consider the tomato

Consider the storebought tomato. At the grocery store, the consumer is presented with row upon row of perfectly round, perfectly red, unblemished and gleaming tomatoes.

Bred for consistency for use in processed food, swollen with chemical fertilizers, sprayed with pesticides, picked early and ripened artificially, refrigerated for long-distance transport, and finally sprayed with liquid waxes to add extra shine, grocery store tomatoes appear perfectly red and perfectly round. A single blemish on a tomato would keep it from being purchased; it would thrown out with the garbage.

But take them home and you find they taste like … nothing at all.

Real tomatoes, grown outdoors without chemicals, are much different. They are misshapen, with great lumps and fissures and ingrowths, often looking like two or three globular tomatoes fused together. Rarely fire-engine red, they are more often a varigate splattering of yellow, green, and deep orange. They are not smooth and waxy but prickly with tiny hairs, like the hairs on the tomato plant itself. Harmless bugs often eat large holes into the fruit - this is the price of waiting for ripeness, but an insect pit, or several insect pits, are easily carved away with a paring knife. You would never throw a tomato away for having a small blemish having planted it and watched it grow for two months, and having seen how many tomato plants and how much land it takes to produce a basketful. And the wait is worth it. Homegrown tomatoes are the most flavorful produce of all: the juice from a real tomato is so acidic and tangy it burns your lips as it dribbles down your chin. They are best enjoyed straight off the vine, still warm from the summer sun, never refrigerated, and eaten plain or with a little bit of salt just to bring out the subtler flavors.

The visually perfect and undeviatingly uniform tomatoes produced by agribusiness, on the other hand, are little more than cellulitic water with, at most, a mild hint of tomato, or something like it. I am always on the verge of deciding they are not worth buying at all, even though nowadays I have no alternative.

I can think of no better metaphor for life in an advanced consumer-capitalist society.