It is worth noting a singular example of the marketing effect on dreams and desires. Stiegler quotes a 15 year old French boy who says his peers no longer dream of a family or career, because they believe they will be the last (or next to last) generation. Insert the pre-fabricated ‘Greta’ figure, a fully corporate bankrolled symbol of ‘youth’ (with a Volkish subtext), pitching draconian green capitalist notions and appearing everywhere in media, including the covers of several major glossy magazines. This is another aspect of appropriation. The fascist sensibility is one already interrupted in a sense. (see Anders Breivik for example). The stories that come from the digital hegemonic media are ones of catastrophe: nuclear annihilation, pandemics, environmental apocalypse. Behind each there is another story, the story of profit. And like the disappearing of Khartoum or Colombo, there is the disappearing of dissent. The disappearing, certainly, of entire populations who evidence skepticism. But Stiegler is very perceptive in recognizing the absence of (what he calls) an epoch. Which is, really, another way of describing the constant de-contextualizing of digital media.
“This is what I have called, in pursuing the reflections of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, societies of hyper-control. These societies, however, are no longer quite societies, if it is true that a society is constituted only within an epoch: they are aggregations of individuals who are increasingly disindividuated (disintegrated). More and more, this is leading to the rise of that new kind of barbarism glimpsed in 1944, the contemporary realization of which is what we are here calling disruption. The reconstitution of a true automatic society can occur only by establishing a true economy of sharing – whereas what the current disruption produces is, on the contrary, a diseconomy of sharing, that is, a destruction of those who share by the means of what they share.”
Bernard Stiegler (Ibid)
“Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever’… ‘the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation… and ‘The phenomenon of separation’ is part and parcel of the unity of the world.”
Guy Debord (Ibid)
“Both Lukács and Korsch (and then Gramsci 1975; and Althusser 1971) suggest a new battleground for political struggle that goes beyond surplus value extraction and is concerned with production and reproduction of social relationships and subjectivities operating at the level of an ideological and culturally material battleground.”
Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano (The Spectacle 2.0)
Taken together these quotes touch on the essential question of the destruction of the social. (and again, it was Cory Morningstar who used that term in her analysis of the ‘Great Reset’). Capital is still the engine, only now value extraction is situated within a process of extracting the human from humanity.
One of the most prominent qualities of the US/NATO/Russia discourse is that the US project, the NATO expansion as part of total global domination, does not even quite make sense to those driving it. The Rand Corporation and CATO institute et al are home to singularly myopic sociopaths. Men and women who are actually among the least aware of history and least able to grasp the contours of the destruction they cause. The CIA and Pentagon are home to equally disturbed individuals. One of the things Debord hinted at was the detachment from reality in the ruling class.
But returning to the psychic disfigurement occurring through screen habituation. I think one of the very under explored subjects in analysing the current malaise is how cyberspace affects childhood development. How the loss of attention (more on that below) in the caregiver or parent, the mediation of screens, effects social relations for the child later in life.
“In the Oedipus complex, the subject identifies with the father, who imposes the prohibition of the child’s desire for the mother. By identifying with the father, the child no longer identifies with a mirrored image or with a similar one, such as the mother or a brother. Through the father, the child identifies with a language and culture.”
Luca M. Posatti (Ibid)
Now, this libidinal withdrawal, this introversion, often the result of narcissistic fear, or of schizophrenic anxiety, is given expression through an aesthetics of sentimentality and bathos, and in the intellectual comfort of a manichean simplicity that makes clear who to cheer and who to boo. The master narrative for most NATO aggressions follows the trusted formula of enemy depravity and the redemptive quality of American violence. To use the title of Richard Slotkin, regeneration through violence. The narcissistic bourgeois culture of north America tends toward both Rockwellian sentimentality, and fetishistic visual caressing of weaponry. The sentimentality is so ubiquitous that it passes without real notice. Narratives in Hollywood TV drama, cop shows in particular, are saturated to a degree hard to describe. It is so pervasive that even the most rudimentary gesture or remark has linkage to the familiar emotions of sentimentality.
Amalia Ramanankirahina
The abdication of cultural authority to commericial product began in earnest after WW2. It accelerated greatly in the 70s. I have written of this timeline before. It was the week Freidkin’s masterpiece Sorcerer was released, a week in which Star Wars was also released. One made a lot of money and one did not. The political in art is not in the content. In fact the agit prop end of culture is among the most boring. No, the political is the unconscious, the contemplative, and the spiritual. I use political in a very broad sense, but it is the examination of otherness.
“I believe, however, that aesthetic ambition in this sense has today largely collapsed. And this is because a huge proportion of the population is totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing, now hegemonic for the vast majority of the world, and is, therefore, estranged from any experience of aesthetic investigation.”
Bernard Stiegler (Symbolic Misery)
When I think of great film art I think of Bresson, or Fassbinder, of Antonioni perhaps, and Pasolini certainly. Of Dryer and Val Lewton and Siodmak and Welles and Ford. One of the most difficult aspects of teaching film (as I did at the Polish National Film School) is breaking down this functional stupidity in the students. The difficulty of explaining why Bresson is radical, and even political in a very real sense. Or trying to correct why these same students saw the wrong political in Fassbinder. But I am meandering again. The point is that the loss of aesthetic ambition, as Stiegler put it, is a greasing of the path to fascism. The camp and kitsch aesthetics, too, soon imploded on themselves and were unable to prevent the evolution to wokeness and the policing of opinion. The idiotic pronoun wars feed the simplistic ahistoricism of NATO/Ukraine. Virtue signaling is the backdoor of authoritarianism. Women’s sports infiltrated by men expresses a pathological misogyny. For genuine aesthetic ambition is in the mysteries of our desires and fears.
Art (and culture) also include a moral and ethical dimension.
“Deleuze defined the act of creation as an “act of resistance.” Resistance to death, first of all, but also resistance to the paradigm of information, through which power is exercised in what he calls “control societies,” to distinguish them from the disciplinary societies analyzed by Foucault. Each act of creation resists something—for example, Deleuze says, Bach’s music is an act of resistance against the separation of the sacred from the
profane.”
Giorgia Agamben (Creation and Anarchy)
Agamben notes Wittgenstein’s remark (in his notes for a preface to Philosophical Investigations) that “how having to resist the pressure and friction that an age that is lacking in culture—which his age was for him and certainly ours is for us —opposes to creation ends up dispersing and fragmenting the forces of an individual. ” (Ibid) The language of art and culture today has been trivialized, and this has made for some rather significant problems. But these problems overlap with the loss of interpretation. For the artist is always his own interpreter. The automatic reticular society, the society in which the artist lives, is (per Stigler) always too late. When philistine critics speak of artists ‘exploring’ this or that, they have no idea what they are writing. Its just filler. It means nothing, literally. Now, to back up a second, Agamben spends a good deal of time in one of the essays in the Creation and Anarchy collection on this idea of potential. I don’t want to get too far into that right here, but the superficial quality of contemporary culture speaks to a kind of creative exhaustion. Not that there is nothing to create but that artists (sic) create anything. Writers write whatever pops into their heads, painters just go about wasting paint (if they are affluent) and never contemplating that *resistance* is partly a choosing not-to.
“…tastelessness is always a not being able not to do something.”
Giorgio Agamben (Ibid)
The ethical aspect is tied to these various forms of withholding. In a culture of such absolute commodification, the reified haunts all creative endeavour. And it is worth quoting this paragraph from Agamben, because what is being said here can be extrapolated further in the social:
“What is poetry if not an operation in language that deactivates and renders inoperative its communicative and informative functions in order to open them to a new possible use? Or, in Spinoza’s terms, the point at which language, having deactivated its utilitarian functions, rests in itself and contemplates its potential to say. In this sense, Dante’s Commedia, Leopardi’s Canti, and Caproni’s Il seme del piangere are the contemplation of the Italian language; Arnaut’s sestina is the contemplation of the Provençal language; Trilce and the posthumous poems of Vallejo are the contemplation of the Spanish language; Rimbaud’s Illuminations are the contemplation of the French language; Hölderlin’s hymns and Trakl’s poetry are the contemplation of the German language.”
Giorgio Agamben (Ibid)
Rothko’s work was a contemplation of colour — but such a contemplation becomes more than just about colour. Take Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, a film I think is often miss-read. And far from my favorite Bresson. But one aspect is that it’s Bresson’s contemplative unpacking of the American western. Somewhere in an interview Welles spoke of hating things, activities, artforms, that had become folkloric. He meant bullfighting in that instance but it applies to any form that has lost its social relevance (and relevance is an insufficient word but will have to do for now). Japanese Noh drama is now folkloric. The writings, the theory, the form remains exquisite, but it is no longer a part of Japanese culture. I think cinema is going through a stage of transition. The other end of which is not yet clear. But one cannot make L’Aventura today, or Out of the Past for that matter. Or The Searchers or Ordet. I am not sure ‘feature length’ films can be made that are relevant. And part of the change is because of digital technology and streaming services and how extended narratives are consumed (experienced). The ‘binge’ phenomenon became popular for a number of reasons, including economic (its cheaper to stay home) but most importantly because even if the series is terrible, the extended narrative provides relief. It may be a transitory and superficial relief, but it provides space for something resembling contemplation.
But what does it mean to say Rothko’s paintings were a contemplation of colour?
“For this reason, the crisis that Europe is going through—as should be evident in the dismantling of its university institutions and in the growing museification of culture—is not an economic problem (“economy” today is a shibboleth and not a concept) but a crisis of the relationship with the past. Since obviously the only place in which the past can live is the present, if the present is no longer aware of its past as living, then universities and museums become problematic places. And if art has today become for us an eminent figure—perhaps the eminent figure—of this past, then the question that we must never stop posing is: what is the place of art in the present?”
Giorgio Agamben (Ibid)
This is a question that I posed in the last workshop I conducted in LA about four years ago. For it is a crucial question, and this idea of an erased past, a lost sense of history, is tied into both computational capitalism and the psychic effects of media, both in an ideological sense, but also a psychoanalytic sense. Our retreat from the world, the substitution of a virtual real for the actual real, is an allegory. Kafka certainly looms as the most prescient writer of how ‘living’ allegory might work — the pandemic created an allegorical frame for wealth transference (further wealth transference) to the top one percent. It also framed a narcissistic hypocondria, and a sense of foreboding that has been a big part of the rise of this new fascism globally. And smart phone usage has intensified the repetitive compulsive part of small motor function, but it also has changed how people read, when they Adam Garfinkle, in National Affairs, has a piece on just this. Needless to say, since this IS National Affairs, the general points made tend toward the reactionary, but that said, it is more than a little interesting to see Henry Kissinger quoted and then to agree with him.
Garfinkle writes: “Deep reading alone creates the possibility of a private internal dialogue with an author not physically present.” (National Affairs, Spring 2020) And this reminds me of a very distinct memory I have of reading. I was only about 16 or so, and was reading Nietzsche. And I had a feeling of ‘knowing’ Nietzsche. Of having this conversation in a sense, with a man dead for a hundred years. And it is a profound memory, and I remember it with great clarity. Now Garfinkle quotes Ortega y Gasset, from Revolt of the Masses:
But there are a couple of points I want to address, because I wonder if they are actually true, per se. One is the idea that, what Garfinkle calls (well he quotes Richard Cytowic), ‘stone age brains ‘ were not as reflective, not as active in some fashion as our own. Actually hunter gatherer societies only spent 20% of their waking lives hunting and gathering (sic). What were they doing the rest of the time? Watching the stars I suspect, watching nature, tracking the changes of the seasons. But little is really known of those very early communities, other than they changed very little for thousands of years. But by the time of the ancient Egyptians, who were highly sophisticated thinkers, man was likely just as agile mentally as humans today. So here we have a contemporary scientist falling prey to his own critique. He is assuming technology equals progress and I have to come to suspect it doesn’t equal progress even a little bit.
“In science fiction, the typical worry is that machines will become human-like; the more pressing problem now is that, through the thinning out of our interactions, humans are becoming machine-like. That raises the possibility that the more time we spend with machines and the more dependent on them we become, the dumber we tend to get since machines cannot determine their own purposes.”
Adam Garfinkle (Ibid)
But this is pretty much just an interesting popular magazine version of this topic, though one with surprisingly cogent points.
“For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole.”
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
The Fascist and Syndicalist species…characterized by…a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason’.”
.The importance of art lies in its relationship to culture, and culture is social. There is no culture if everyone is at home staring at screens, regardless of what is on those screens. Even in film, the audience, sitting together, and together focusing their attention on that particular screen, is a kind of communal experience. And even if I sit in an empty theatre and watch that particular film, my experience is shared (unless I am the only one who ever watched that particular film). For I am aware of that absent audience. There is something in digital technology, something perhaps even beyond the manipulations of social media platforms and the like, something in the very technics of cyber experience that is isolating. It siphons off the sort of attention one associates with reading, or watching theatre, and it replaces it (without ones knowing it or being aware of it) with another kind of ersatz attention. This ersatz attention is deadening. By which I mean it is an attention that eliminates the social and the shared, and replaces it with unawareness. A kind of morbid focus from which it is actually hard to break free. Television does something like this, too. People watch in a way that makes them oblivious to the space around them. When one reads or listens to music attentively, contemplatively, one certainly withdraws from what is going on near them, but it is not a withdrawal from the world. Like my experience with Nietzsche, I felt I knew this voice, and I knew others, millions of others over a hundred some years, had known this voice as well. This is one aspect of ‘tradition’ that I keep returning to, though I fear the word tradition carries the wrong connotations. When watching a computer screen the viewer is alone, and has always been alone in a sense, and will always be alone, too. There is no cultural horizon, and today’s viewer is anyway uninterested in a shared interior discourse. Its important to note here that the real war going on remains a class war. For most of the planet don’t own screens. These people are not the target demographic for any marketing firm. They are surplus humanity in the eyes of the 1%. And increasingly in the eyes of those whose identification is with that 1%.
“Philosophical aesthetics found itself confronted with the fatal alternative between dumb and trivial universality on the one hand and, on the other, arbitrary judgments usually derived from conventional opinions.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)
Adorno, interestingly notes two examples of scientific discoveries launching aesthetic correctives (as it were) Piero della Francesca’s discovery of arial perspective, and the Florintine Camerata, out of which Opera originated. And pointillism and some impressionism that (wrongly but never mind) sought to manipulate retinal discoveries. But nothing has come out of digital screen experience. If anything it has simply taken much away. These reflections are to be considered in the shadow of cognitive decline — or if you are an optimist –change. The contemporary subject cannot escape consuming the junk out there. (unless you follow the Ted Kaczynski path). When I asked the question of what is the role of art, in that workshop in LA, the best non answer I could find was that we who believe in the seriousness of art are to be like Coptic monks in the desert who keep safe the sacred scrolls of antiquity. Our retreat as allegory, again. But a retreat that is not nihilistic. For computational capital IS nihilistic.
https://john-steppling.com/2022/05/stone-age-brain/
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