|
“Money talks” thus goes the saying, but is there not another saying which
immediately and almost by some divine kind of automata nullifies this? This
other saying is of course “See no, hear no, speak no evil”; a statement
which of course conjures up classical morality in the sense of Christianity
and Manichaeism, that battle of good versus evil is of course an ethical
betrayal (and morality especially in the Nietzschean sense is of course
always a betrayal of ethics), it is a turning away from realization, a
falsification which blurs the actuality, paints it in different color so
that we no longer can see the true issues at hand, so that our gaze gets
pulled away from that which is important. One could of course think of the
instinct of sexuality and as to how it has been repressed by Christianity,
resulting of course in that grand Victorian age where the other (the female)
has been reduced to the portrait of a face.
More importantly however, where this idea of masking and turning away shows
up the most (or most drastically) is in modern consumerist capitalism, where
we find this bizarre twist in the dialectics of Marxist ideology. Strictly
speaking, I think that the problems which Marx thought about, were not about
capitalism but rather purely about industrialism, the problem of the worker
and of the working class is not about capitalism but really is just the
industrio-mechanization of Hegel’s master-slave dynamics, the idea of
capital(ism) was just a secondary attachment to all of this. The true
opponent was always Hegel, was always the need for master and slave
relationships and the seemingly inescapability of either to oppress or to be
oppressed.
The full-scale problem of capitalism on the other hand, is a problem of the
post-liberal landscape which emerged after the second world war and which
skyrocketed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. At heart, we can say, that the
problem of modern day capitalism is a problem of communication, because what
capitalism does is to take a hold of communication as a total concept and
transforms it into some consumerist device: communication becomes all that
is marketable. Bearing this communicative issue in mind, the problem is thus
not of capital versus the working class; rather, the whole class mentality
is just a red herring because the problem resides in this devastating
tension created between capitalism and the individual. The word ‘individual’
is of course synonymous with that of a speech/communicative singularity and
what we thus find, is the mass of capitalist integration versus the original
and authentic self, and with this we arrive at an altogether new
socio-political field, namely that of pre-fabricated consumerism, in which
the individual loses all authenticity and exists only and solely as a dot
within the mass which can only be seen through magnification, a
magnification however which is meaningless since there is no individualistic
behavior of the individual which is allowed. Language as such changed
drastically in the hands of capitalism because language is no longer about
being expressive, but much rather about being easily digestible, that way
ensuring mass-consumption. The trick of mass-consumption is thus to
pre-fabricate (pre-digest even?) everything so that all is easily absorbed,
the easier something gets absorbed by the psyche the more successful it
becomes. One can find a good example of this in a lot of movies, because the
most popular movies are always those which are the easiest to digest, those
which provide good entertainment. Digestibility is thus an issue of
cognition; something is easy to digest if we do not have to use a lot of
cognitive effort to digest it ourselves. As such all capitalism is always a
censorship, but not of a political motivated kind as found in ‘totalitarian
regimes’ (?) but of a certain sense of formality, a censorship against
everything which does not obey a certain pre-fabricated form and structure.
What we thus find is as to how consumerism has manipulated and ultimately
has ‘fixated’ cybernetics so that we have a fully integrated system allowing
for maximum communication which however remains empty of true depth and
content. Communication as such, is this rigorousness of cybernetic
commercialism, a closed loop which does not allow anything foreign; it is a
glorified xeno-eidetics, a purge of anything alien (anything meaningful!)
which might interrupt the maximum digestibility and consumability.
The ideology of class society as such no longer exists, because there really
is no longer an all important and omnipresent problematic of a class
differentiation based on the aspect of a mere ‘economy’ (in the
simplified/financial sense of the word), what we do have, is a communicative
differentiation which expresses itself in two poles: the manipulator of
language on the one side and the absorber of language on the other; and the
functionalism of this communication, is that it is a one way street because
the manipulator never listens in the proper sense but only hears in the
statistical sense by means of ratings and it is here that we find that
cybernetics has become a frozen issue, because there is no depth in
feedback, there is no sense of any real aesthetics, but merely agreement or
disagreement. What makes anything good, be it a film, TV series, a book, a
piece of music or a work of art? There is no longer ay importance of ‘idea’
of ‘content’; critical acclaim is no longer critical; there is just and only
this factor, this critical threshold: something is good and beautiful and
successful if it is above that threshold, everything below is just waste,
that which is forbidden because it is not hip and trendy not what the
‘public’ (?) wants!
So where do we find this manipulator of a language turned into a mere
communicative economy? There no longer is a clear and present ‘image’ of a
THEY or a THEM, there is no longer the industrialist or the bourgeois,
because first and foremost there is no clear cut and obvious conflict; and
as such ‘they’ has really become ‘they’, because who are they? Multinational
cooperations! Megaloperations! But what does all this really mean? Where do we
find these? We are all familiar with megalopolizing brand names, but what is
in a name? Brand names, cooperative slogans are masks, veils around proper
names and faces! We might perhaps know as to who is president of a certain
company but what is often neglected /forgotten is that a word such as
‘president’ has become rather meaningless; it might point to a specific
person, but the functionality, the hierarchical positioning of that person
has become lost and thus the title no longer refers to anything concrete and
sustained.
If there is anything that the French Revolution accomplished, it was exactly
this: the abolishment of title and signification! That which induced so much
fear about Absolutism and the Ancient Regime always was concerning the idea
of power conceived in its own independent right, properly speaking the
revolt of the Enlightenment was never a revolt against power (power is of
course always a necessary factor, something which is obvious since Hobbes’
Leviathan) but much rather it was a revolt against the absolute
meaning/signification of ‘title’. If we look at the Ancient Regime and the
‘postulation’ of the monarchy (postulation rather than institution, because
traditional monarchy and even the church lack the complexification of
institutionalization) power was always based directly on the language of the
significance of the title; the very meaning/essence of Absolutisms lays in
the absolute power of the title, where the monarch ruled by absolute power
and virtue of his/her title.
All of this came to change with the French Revolution and the importance of
revolt here, is thus that of a complete change in the power paradigm, and
what is perhaps most ironic here is that the death of Absolutism gave rise
to a more accurate conception of power, showed power the way it was seen by
Hobbes. Thus for better or for worse, the Enlightenment realized the true
context in which power is situated, namely that of filling up the vacuum and
it is exactly here, in this realization, that we find the true birth of the
institution.
There is no image properly speaking of this institution nor of the
multinational cooperation because by definition they always partake in
invisibility, the way the megaloperation works is always through a
perfection of masquerade, its image is just the consumerability of its brand
name. This invisibility of power is important because it also shows why this
postmodern landscape of megaloperisation and globalization is ever so more
frightening than the landscape of Absolutism, because there is no longer a
linear (visible) distribution of power; the whole network has become a
gigantic fractalization of power where power begets an infinite kind of
distribution and there no longer is any centralization of power (as indeed
was the central concept in the structeralization of Absolutism) there is
rather a spreading across different nodes which for the most party remain
ignorant of one another and only remain standing in communicative
relationship by virtue of some kind of an emergency broadcast frequency. The
importance of the whole has however been completely destroyed because it is
so contrary to the nature of institutionalization which is indefinably
defined by the knowledge of what it means ‘to scatter’. Contrary to the
summarized image of the institution, there is no such proper image of the
institution because it exists everywhere, it is spread across the
socio-political landscape and its lack of a proper image is its strength
because it keeps everything hidden and power can thus be
utilized/broadcasted without having to reveal anything. What
institutionalization does, is to break itself up in small units which are
vaguely interconnected but always with slight differences, especially qua
agenda and functionality.
The idea is of course always the same: to create a massive bastion in which
to lock up truth; and there we find another important aspect capitalist
politics has learned from the French Revolution, namely the whole issue of
the judicial and penitentiary system. If there is one thing which
drastically changed in the period following the French Revolution, it is a
greater movement a privation of justice and punishment. The whole of the law
becomes a vast book of possible disciplination, but always with deliberate
obscurity which obscures the individual; an awareness of which we can find
both in the literary work of Kafka and the philosophical investigations of
Foucault. Justice closes its doors on itself and creates a sense of
paranoia; in this respect we have an intensification of ancient politics of
religiosity, that thunderous voice of Moses’ God or even of the ancient
Greek gods: man once again finds himself at the mercy of something ‘beyond’,
except that there is not even the idea of a God, just that vagueness of the
word ‘institution’, but no one ever knows where that points/refers to.
Justice locks itself up with a communicative deliberateness, to create an
altogether new sense of the almighty speaking God of the Ten Commandments,
but with this difference that there is no obvious rage, everything always
happens behind close doors without any emotional affection.
“See no, hear no, speak no evil!” But how does one know as to what is evil?
And therein lays the start of a judicial kind of paranoia: am I really being
good? Might I not be evil? Foucault has pointed out this closing of the
doors with great depth in his ‘discipline and punish’, as to how the whole
of judicial procedures takes place behind closed doors, everything remains
hidden and this leads to a feeling of alienation within the individual. In
high courts there even is no allowance of photography and images must be
‘drawn’ and what this means, is that which is not allowed is
actual/objective representation of justice; so unlike the God of the Old
Testament who even though he always remained ‘veiled’ always enjoyed to show
himself as ‘present’, the modern judicial system always enjoys being like a
force in physics: a hidden and non-localized presence!
A lot has thus been learned since the failure of 1789 and most important is
the realization that anything which has an image (properly speaking) can be
overthrown -the Bastille or even the Tower of London-; what creates struggle
is not there being oppression, but rather images of oppression: take away
those images and we take away the awareness of any oppression. There is an
important notion here which we find with Machiavelli, namely that it is
better to be feared than to be hated; and capitalist consumerism plays
exactly on this; the idea of the institute in general plays on this because
hate can only occur when there is something to project your hatred upon,
whereas fear is allowed to remain nameless, unlocalized and irrational.
Hatred needs something and as such the system only allows hatred as a tool,
something which is evident for instance in the functioning of Nazi
propaganda by Goebbels and Hitlerian speech expression and provocativity:
that Jews are to blame! And similar things are to be found in the world
around us today: the evil of the Arab terrorist and from the Arab’s point of
view, the evil of the Western crusader. Feeding hate to the people and
diverting their attention is in part what is happening with this political
preoccupation with terror (our war upon it), to offer the people a
sacrificial lamb and thus motivate them. What is different however in our
times is that we only give the lamb halfway; meaning that we protect it the
same time, because we know that an ethnic cleansing is not the answer and
thus we find a great advantage which democracy has over traditional
totalitarianism, because it does not end with dead, disaster and
annihilation, or at least not in the obvious sense because what we find is a
‘democratization’ (?) something reminiscent of the religious spreading of
the word!
The problem inherent in the idea of ‘democratization’ is however not
concerning a socio-political reality in a sense of ethics, but rather in a
sense of epistemology, in the way certain ideals related to democracy (or
rather have become attached) change certain communicative structures within
the sphere of humanity. The capitalistic attachment hijacks the language of
the ethical consciousness; it is the ultimate play upon the moral of the
faery-tale: on over-simplification of human interaction and a destruction of
psychological complicity. Psycho-pharmaceutics are a good issue here,
because even though there is an obvious need for them, what is at issue
(play) here is not a game of the psycho-neurological workings of
psycho-pharmaceutics, but much rather the communicative commercialization of
them; where it becomes just the use of drugs and the problem is that if we
become to materialistic, to factualized concerning scientific nature and
biology, we come to forget the involved humanity, a problem which was
brushed upon even by Heidegger: namely that science forgets the humanistic
element of being-human, what he called man’s world-forming capacity. The
issue of psycho-pharmaceutics is intrinsically linked to capitalist
consumerism because it once again obeys that pre-fabricated formology of
maximum communication yet empty! What a fundamentalist view of
psycho-pharmaceutics does, is this ready made availability of answers, a
total annihilation of anything that is subjective, because subjectivity
always goes against pre-fabricated digestibility! Psycho-pharmaceutics is
thus akin to a palliative psychiatry (thus radically anti-Freudian) it is a
masquerade in which we seemingly take away the mental illness by taking away
the symptoms. However, there is this neglect for the issue of what causes
mental illness! As such this cure-all attitude of psycho-pharmaceutics is
just a temporal suspension of mental illness and ultimately it turns mental
illness in yet another area of marketability; in pretty much the same that
Viagra and natural male enhancement turned sexuality into a market.
Language/communication gets hijacked because ‘we’ (?) do not want there to
be any open issues, ‘we’ (?) do not want anything to remain unresolved,
which is why the prefix ‘tele-‘ is so important: this notion of everything
always and forevermore being at a distance, because we like to
pretend/indulge that nothing can ever happen to ‘us’, that nothing ever
occurs in our own yard. Through tele-vision we have learned to distance
ourselves from images and perhaps as it ahs been suggested by auteur Michael
Haneke in his film “Benny’s Video”: the world/idea has become distorted
through this tele-visualized epistemology, because more and more we are
grown use to interactive consumerability at a distance; everything always
appears (and remains) at the horizon and nothing ever is within reach and as
such we never take anything serious because we are only tele-ontologically
involved with our world, we are only involved in a sense of the observant,
observant rather than observer because even here we are not really active,
we do not really actively and energetically partake in the
grammar/conjunction of ‘to observe’; we just happen to pass by, stumble upon
or more precise ‘to sit there’.
It is here of course that we find capitalist consumerism going full circle,
because the way it operates is by allowing the third person conjugation to
go extreme, to create an infinite distance between source and recipient, to
turn it all into a fairytale; something somewhere once upon a time …
capitalist consumerism is thus and hence the ultimate democratic demagogue,
a ready-mad giveness to give the people pre-digested foods which give a
maximum of olfactory and gastronomical riches (ironically through blandness)
while causing a certain over stimulation of the visual system.
There is no longer any awareness of television, it just becomes one with the
microwave oven, so capitalist consumerism creates this interface with which
we can easily interact at a distance but which the same time causes us to
become enslaved at a distance; everything happens more and more without our
acute awareness, happens through bypassing conscious realization because we
have become linguistically enforced to encode things in a certain way,
because society demands a certain commercialized standard.
Returning now to our opening statement “money talks” and the immediacy of
the implication of its refutation. It is perhaps a true and accurate
statement that “money talks”, but if it does it is only under that veiled
manipulation of capitalist consumerism, because as with all arts and
culture, talking/writing is always an issue of editing; because properly
speaking there never is any real text: there is only the edited text and
hence the edited content, the edited communication and as such we find a
real similarity between totalitarianism and capitalism because ultimately
(as aforementioned) it is always about a control of language as such the
major difference is not such much political or even infrastructural, but
much rather it is about imagery. As mentioned before there is always a need
to hide (a need to create a generalized sense of paranoia) and it is always
about a systematic control of language/communication. What capitalist
consumerism does add to all of this, is a certain idea of the use of
pleasure, a quality of hedonism in which freedom gets transformed into a
purely materialistic concept. A robotisation of the of the human so to speak
(see for instance François Truffaut’s film “Fahrenheit 451” based upon Ray
Bradbury’s novel which really depicts all of this very well) in which
cognitively speaking we all become clones of the same one thought and as
such we have a new (albeit slightly distorted) incarnation of Nietzschean
slave-morality, where instead of vague notions such as God, Yahweh or Allah
we have an even vaguer notion of ‘?’.
Money talks because it weaves tales, it works on our attention and creates
attentional blindness; a blindness which puts a cover on corporate scandal
and corruption, because more and more consumerist entertainment (culture?)
seems to have the function of pulling away people’s attention from reality
to the world of celebrity culture (?) and entertainment. What we thus have
in this world of capitalistic enchantment, is a bewitchment of this
landscape of culture, of media ecology; so we find yet another form of
pollution in the name of progress (?), something which we encounter in the
work of Fromm as the problem of ‘to have’ and ‘to be’; again, a freedom
turned into mere materialism, because freedom is no longer about ‘being’
(all of that has been purged) but much rather freedom is about having, and
this again is something which can be traced to philosophies of the
enlightenment and liberalism; we have to surrender something in order to be
free, a sacrifice for the greater good as we find in Locke and Bentham; but
what we must give up is being because what is inherent in all philosophies
of liberty is this enormously complex word: ‘economy’. There is this concept
of the free market, but what exactly is implistically hidden here? Because
indeed we find that there is this need to give birth to this paradigmatic
shift of being into having, and it is to here that we can trace the birth of
the megaloporization, where politics turns purely economic (and related
hedonism), the globalized message as such becomes: “more, more, more
(forever-more)”. As such however we find ourselves more than ever in that
position of Nietzschean slave morality, because even more than religion does
consumerism keep one trapped in an invisible maze; the interesting part of
the maze (that which makes it invisible) is that whenever we have the
feeling of being lost, we are given a new toy to play with and as such
freedom really has become a pacifier. “See no, hear, speak no evil!” because
indeed we are more interested in the latest ‘hot’ gossip than in what goes
on in the ‘actuality’ (?) of our world-environment ; and as such it all
comes down to attentional deficits, we do not see, we do not hear and we do
not speak because there is no such awareness to begin with.
The issue of Marxist ideology no longer exists because upon this chessboard
of humanity we have all been turned into mere pawns, we are just here as
veils around the royalty, except that royalty is no longer a monarchical
idea, but rather an economic reference towards that “board”, the corporate
rulers of the cooperation. Royalty remains hidden and so does its decadent
mannerism! At the end of it all, have we changed that much from the
decadence and flamboyancy of the Ancient Regime? As mentioned before, the
only that has changed is the imagery, there no longer is this issue of
hierarchical title, no longer a direct power status of Absolutism. Power has
become hidden in one obscure cybernetic framework, a labyrinth of invisible
walls that presents itself as paradise. There is capital silence, because
money talks in editions of elaborate (de)meaning of (dis)figurative
narrative that would make the writers of ancient mythos blush. And as for
the Self, the being of fate and its individual bearer; it has become some
archaic term of rebellion: “you are either with us or you are against us!”
Orlando 2007
Steven Van Neste
|
|