Part 3 (2/2)

It is no small irony that the militants of Empire stand exposed for the incomprehension of the trajectory of modernity by one of their opposite number, Oswald Spengler. As nationalist and reactionary that Spengler was, The Decline of the West is the great masterwork of world history, and his grasp of Western civilization's inner logic is uncanny in its prescience.

Especially relevant here are Spengler's judgments, so many decades ago, concerning technological development and its social, cultural, and environmental impacts. He saw that the dynamic, promethean (”Faustian”) nature of global civilization becomes fully realized as selfdestructive ma.s.s society and equally calamitous modern technology. The subjugation of nature leads ineluctably to its destruction, and to the destruction of civilization. ”An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do everything in mechanical terms.”” Civilized man is a ”petty creator against Nature.” ”... This revolutionary in the world of life... has become the slave of his creature. The Culture, the aggregate of artificial, personal, self-made life-forms, develops into a close-barred cage. ...”~4 Whereas Marx viewed industrial civilization as both reason incarnate and a permanent achievement, Spengler saw it as ultimately incompatible with its physical environment, and therefore suicidally transitory. ”Higher Man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with blood, deformed and mutilated it.”” Spengler understood that ”the history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close.”~6 Theodor Adorno seemed to concur with elements of Spengler's thinking: ”What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline .”17 Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment 8 has a critique of civilization at its core, with its focal image of Odysseus forcibly repressing the Sirens' song of eros. Dialectic's central thesis is that ”the history of civilization is... the history of renunciation.”” As Albrecht Wellmer summed it up, ”Dialectic of Enlightenment is the theory of an irredeemably darkened modernity.”10 This perspective, now continually augmented by confirming data, tends to render irrelevant both sources of theory and the logic of progress. If there is no escape from a condition we can understand all too well, what more is there to say?

Herbert Marcuse tried to lay out an escape route in Eros and Civilization,” by attempting to uncouple civilization from modernity. To preserve the ”gains” of modernity, the solution is a ”non-repressive” civilization. Marcuse would dispense with ”surplus repression,” implying that repression itself is indispensable. Since modernity depends on production, itself a repressive inst.i.tution, redefining work as free play can salvage both modernity and civilization. I find this an implausible, even desperate defense of civilization. Marcuse fails to refute Freud's view that civilization cannot be reformed.

Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents that non-repressive civilization is impossible, because the foundation of civilization is a forcible ban on instinctual freedom and eros. To introduce work and culture, the ban must be permanently imposed. Since this repression and its constant maintenance are essential to civilization, universal civilization brings universal neurosis.” Durkheim had already noted that as humankind ”advances” with civilization and the division of labor, ”the general happiness of society is decreasing.”33 As a good bourgeois, Freud justified civilization on the grounds that work and culture are necessary and that civilization enables humans to survive on a hostile planet. ”The princ.i.p.al task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature.” And further, ”But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all to strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear.”34 Possibly civilization's most fundamental ideological underpinning is Hobbes' characterization of the pre-civilized state of nature as ”nasty, brutish, and short.” Freud subscribed to this view, of course, as did Adorno and Horkheimer.

Since the mid-196os there has been a paradigm s.h.i.+ft in how anthropologists understand prehistory, with profound implications for theory. Based on a solid body of archaeological and ethnographic research, mainstream anthropology has abandoned the Hobbesian hypothesis. Life before or outside civilization is now defined more specifically as social existence prior to domestication of animals and plants. Mounting evidence demonstrates that before the Neolithic s.h.i.+ft from a foraging or gatherer-hunter mode of existence to an agricultural lifeway, most people had ample free time, considerable gender autonomy or equality, an ethos of egalitarianism and sharing, and no organized violence.

A (misleadingly-named) ”Man the Hunter” conference at the University of Chicago in 1966 launched the reversal of the Hobbesian view, which for centuries had provided ready justification for all the repressive inst.i.tutions of a complex, imperializing Western culture. Supporting evidence for the new paradigm has come forth from archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Adrienne Zihlman, and many others; these studies are widely available, and now form the theoretical basis for everything from undergraduate courses to field research.

Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of how our Paleolithic forbears led mainly peaceful, egalitarian, and healthy lives for about two million years. The use of fire to cook tuberous vegetables as early as 1.9 million years ago, and long distance sea travel 8oo,ooo years ago, are two findings among many that testify to an intelligence equal to our own.36 Genetic engineering and imminent human cloning are just the most current manifestations of a dynamic of control and domination of nature that humans set in motion 1o,ooo years ago, when our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and colonized at the deepest levels, paralleling the controls that have been ever more thoroughly engineered at the social level. Now we can see this trajectory for what it really is: a transformation that inevitably brought all-enveloping destruction, that was in no way necessary. Significantly, the worldwide archaeological record demonstrates that many human groups tried agriculture and/or pastoralism and later gave them up, falling back on more reliable foraging and hunting strategies. Others refused for generations to adopt the domestication practices of close neighbors.

It is here that a primitivist alternative has begun to emerge, in theory and in practice.37 To the question of technology must be added that of civilization itself. Ever-growing doc.u.mentation of human prehistory as avery long period of largely non-alienated human life stands in stark contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity.

In the context of his discussion of the limitations of Habermas, Joel Whitebook wrote, ”It may be that the scope of and depth of the social and ecological crisis are so great that nothing short of an epochal transformation of world views will be commensurate with them.”” Since that time, Castoriadis concluded that a radical transformation will ”have to launch an attack on the division of labor in its. .h.i.therto known forms.”39 Division of labor, slowly emerging through prehistory, was the foundation of domestication and continues to drive the technological imperative forward.

The challenge is to disprove George Grant's thesis that we live in ”a world where only catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the potentialities of technique,”4 and to actualize Claude Kornoouh's judgment that revolution can only be redefined against progress.41 Second-Best Life:.

Real Virtuality.

Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relations.h.i.+ps. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial ma.s.s society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized.

In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of'vir- tual” was as the adjectival form of ”virtue”. Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of ident.i.ty and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect intimacy of human and machine, the eradication of difference between in-person and computer-based interaction.

Second Life. Born Again. Both are escape routes from a gravely worsening reality. Both the high-tech and the fundamentalist options are pa.s.sive responses to the actual situation now engulfing us. We are so physically and socially distant from one another, and encroaching virtuality drives us ever further apart. We can choose to ”live” as freefloating surrogates in the new, untrashed Denial Land of VR, but only if we embrace what Zizek called ”the ruthless technological drive which determines our lives.”'

Cybers.p.a.ce means collapsing nature into technology, in the words of Allucquere Rosanne Stone; she notes that we are losing our grounding as physical beings.' The key response in the and techno-world is, of course, more technology. Drug technology, for the 70 million Americans with insomnia; for the s.e.xually dysfunctional males now dependent on v.i.a.g.r.a, Cialis, etc.; for the depressed and anxious who no longer dream or feel.

And as this regime works to further flatten and suppress direct experience, Virtual Reality, its latest triumph, comes in to fill the void. Second Life, There, and whatever brand is next offer dream worlds, to a world denuded of dreams. In our time, ”virtual bereavement” and ”online grieving” are touted as superior to being present to comfort those who mourn;' where tiny infants are subjected to videos; where ”teled.i.l.d.onics” delivers simulated s.e.x to distant subjects.

”Welcome to Second Life. We look forward to seeing you in-world”, the website promo beckons. Immersive and interactive, VR provides the s.p.a.ce so unlike the reality its customers reject. For a few dollars, anyone can exist there as an ”avatar” who will never grow old, bored, or overweight. Wade Roush of Technology Review declares Second Life a success insofar as it is ”less lonely and less predictable” than the life we have now.4 This inversion of reality is the consolation of the supernatural of many religions, and serves a similar subst.i.tutive function.

Reality is disappearing behind a screen, as the separation of mind from body and nature intensifies. The technical means are being perfected fairly quickly, making good on the promises of the early i99os. At that time VR, despite much ballyhoo,' could not really deliver the goods. Fifteen or so years later, the technology of Second Life (for example) engages many users with a strong sense of physical presence and other pseudo-sensory effects. Virtual reality is now the definitive expression of the postmodern condition, perhaps best typified by the fact that nothing wild exists there, only what serves human consumption.

Foucault described the s.h.i.+ft of power in modernity from sovereignty to discipline, and an enormously technologized daily life has accelerated this s.h.i.+ft.' Contemporary life is thoroughly surveilled and policed, to an unprecedented degree. But the weight and density of tech mediation create an even more defining reality, and a more profound stage of control. When the nature of experience, on a primary level, is so deeply altered, we are seeing a fundamental s.h.i.+ft-a s.h.i.+ft being extended everywhere, at an accelerating pace.

Virtual reality best typifies this movement, its simulations and robotic fantasies a cutting-edge component of the steadily advancing, universalizing, standardizing global culture. Sadly pertinent is Philip Zai's judgement that VR is the ”metaphysical maturity of civilization” 7 All that is tangible, sensual, and earth-based corrodes and shrinks within technologically mediated existence.

Of course, there are forms of resistance to this latest efflorescence of the false. But a luddite reaction always seems to pale before the magnitude of what it faces. There is a very long, sedimented history behind every newest technological move, an unbroken chain of contingency. The leap involved in grasping new technics is made easier by the gradual impoverishment of human desires and apt.i.tudes caused by the earlier innovations. The promise is, always, that more technology will bring improvement-which more accurately means, more technology will make up for what was lost in the preceding ”advances”. The only way out is to break this chain, by refusing its imperative.

Heidegger a.s.sailed the ”objectification of all beings... brought into the disposal of representation and production,” pointing out that ”nature appears everywhere as the object of technology”, and concluding that ”World becomes object”.' He also understood how technology changes our relation to things, a phenomenon underlined by virtual reality. ”Talk of a respect for things is more and more unintelligible in a world that is becoming ever more technical. They are simply vanis.h.i.+ng... ,: remarked Gadamer.9 Virtuality is certainly that ”vanis.h.i.+ng”.

There has been in fact a recent counter-attack in favor of respecting things as such, in favor of freeing them from an instrumental status, at least on the philosophical plane. t.i.tles such as Things (2004) and The Lure of the Object (2005) speak to this.' Desire for the authentic experience of ”thingness” (Heidegger's term) is a rebuke to the pathological condition known as modernity, a realization that ”accepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting otherness as such.””

Immersion in virtual reality is a particularly virulent strain of this pathology because of the degree of interactivity and self-representation involved. Never has the built environment depended so crucially on our partic.i.p.ation, and never before has this partic.i.p.ation been so potentially totalizing. With its appeal as, literally, a second life, a second world, it is The Matrix-one that we ourselves are to continually pay to reproduce. Heinz Pagels' description of the symbolic, in general, certainly applies to virtual reality: in denying ”the immediacy of reality and in creating a subst.i.tute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.”” This use of cybers.p.a.ce takes representation to new levels of self-enclosure and self-domestication.

Spengler's survey of Western civilization led him to conclude that ”an artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fas.h.i.+on.”” Second Life, Google Earth, etc., with their graphics cards and broadband connections are sophisticated and enticing escape hatches, but it's still the same basic machine orientation. And VR, as David Gelernter happily proclaimed, ”is the sort of instrument that modern life demands.”4 Born of military research and the entertainment industry, Virtual Reality depends on us for its projected role throughout society. Real virtuality will be the norm when it infects various spheres, but only with our active consent. Wittgenstein felt that ”it is not absurd e.g. to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity”15 Science and technology are the greatest triumphs of civilization, and the point is more grimly apparent than ever.

Breaking Point?

The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living, the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its logic.

The only stable continuity has been that of the body, and that has become vulnerable in unprecedented ways. We now inhabit a culture, according to Furedi', of high anxiety that borders on a state of outright panic. Postmodern discourse suppresses articulations of suffering, a facet of its accommodation to the inevitability of further, systematic desolation. The prominence of chronic degenerative diseases makes a chilling parallel with the permanent erosion of all that is healthy and life-affirming inside industrial culture. That is, maybe the disease can be slowed a bit in its progression, but no overall cure is imaginable in this context-which created the condition in the first place.

As much as we yearn for community, it is all but dead. McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears tell us that 19 years ago, the typical American had three close friends; now the number is two. Their national study also reveals that over this period of time, the number of people without one friend or confidant has tripled.' Census figures show a correspondingly sharp rise in single-person households, as the technoculture-with its vaunted ”connectivity”-grows steadily more isolating, lonely and empty.

In j.a.pan ”people simply aren't having s.e.x” and the suicide rate has been rising rapidly.' Hikikimori, or self-isolation, finds over a million young people staying in their rooms for years. Where the technoculture is most developed, levels of stress, depression and anxiety are highest.

Questions and ideas can only become currents in the world insofar as reality, external and internal, makes that possible. Our present state, devolving toward catastrophe, displays a reality in unmistakable terms. We are bound for a head-on collision between urgent new questions and a totality-global civilization-that can provide no answers. A world that offers no future, but shows no signs of admitting this fact, imperils its own future along with the life, health, and freedom of all beings on the planet. Civilization's rulers have always squandered whatever remote chances they had to prepare for the end of life as they know it, by choosing to ride the crest of domination, in all its forms.

It has become clear to some that the depth of the expanding crisis, which is as ma.s.sively dehumanizing as it is ecocidal, stems from the cardinal inst.i.tutions of civilization itself. The discredited promises of Enlightenment and modernity represent the pinnacle of the grave mistake known as civilization. There is no prospect that this Order will renounce that which has defined and maintained it, and apparently little likelihood that its various ideological supporters can face the facts. If civilization's collapse has already begun, a process now unofficially but widely a.s.sumed, there may be grounds for a widespread refusal or abandonment of the reigning totality. Indeed, its rigidity and denial may be setting the stage for a cultural s.h.i.+ft on an unprecedented scale, which could unfold rapidly.

Of course, a paradigm s.h.i.+ft away from this entrenched, but vulnerable and fatally flawed system is far from unavoidable. The other main possibility is that too many people, for the usual reasons (fear, inertia, manufactured incapacity, etc.) will pa.s.sively accept reality as it is, until it's too late to do anything but try to deal with collapse. It's noteworthy that a growing awareness that things are going wrong, however inchoate and individualized, is fuelled by a deep, visceral unease and in many cases, acute suffering. This is where opportunity resides. From this new perspective that is certainly growing, we find the work of confronting what faces us as a species, and removing the barriers to planetary survival. The time has come for a wholesale indictment of civilization and ma.s.s society. It is at least possible that, in various modes, such a judgment can undo the death-machine before destruction and domestication inundate everything.

Although what's gone before helps us understand our current plight, we now live in obvious subjection, on a plainly greater scale than heretofore. The enveloping techno-world that is spreading so rapidly suggests movement toward even deeper control of every aspect of our lives. Adorno's a.s.sessment in the i96os is proving valid today: ”Eventually the system will reach a point-the word that provides the social cue is 'integration'-where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society. Only that society itself remains the cause.”4 A totality that absorbs every ”alternative” and seems irreversible. Totalitarian. It is its own justification and ideology. Our refusal, our call to dismantle all this, is met with fewer and fewer countervailing protests or arguments. The bottom-line response is more along the lines of ”Yes, your vision is good, true, valid; but this reality will never go away.”

None of the supposed victories over inhumanity have made the world safer, not even just for our own species. All the revolutions have only tightened the hold of domination, by updating it. Despite the rise and fall of various political persuasions, it is always production that has won; technological systems never retreat, they only advance. We have been free or autonomous insofar as the Machine requires for its functioning.

Meanwhile, the usual idiotic judgments continue. ”We should be free to use specific technologies as tools without adopting technology as lifestyle.”5 ”The worlds created through digital technology are real to the extent that we choose to play their games.”6 Along with the chokehold of power, and some lingering illusions about how modernity works, the Machine is faced with worsening prospects. It is a striking fact that those who manage the dominant organization of life no longer even attempt answers or positive projections. The most pressing ”issues” (e.g. Global Warming) are simply ignored, and propaganda about Community (the market plus isolation), Freedom (total surveillance society), the American Dream (!) is so false that it cannot be expected to be taken seriously.

As Sahlins pointed out, the more complex societies become, the less they are able to cope with challenges. The central concern of any state is to preserve predictability; as this capacity visibly fails, so do that state's chances of survival. When the promise of securitywanes, so does the last real support. Many studies have concluded that various ecosystems are more likely to suffer sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than undergo steady, predictable degradation. The mechanisms of rule just might be subject to a parallel development.

In earlier times there was room to maneuver. Civilization's forward movement was accompanied by a safety valve: the frontier. Large-scale expansion of the Holy Roman Empire eastward during the 12th-14th centuries, the invasion of the New World after 1500, the Westward movement in North America through the end of the 19th century. But the system becomes indebted to structures acc.u.mulated during these movements. We are hostages, and so is the whole hierarchical ensemble. The whole system is busy, always in flux; transactions take place at an ever-accelerating rate. We have reached the stage where the structure relies almost wholly on the co-optation of forces that are more or less outside its control. A prime example is the actual a.s.sistance given by modernizing leftist regimes in South America. The issue is not so much that of the outcome of neo-liberal economics in particular, but of the success of the left in power at furthering self-managed capital and co-opting indigenous resistance into its...o...b..t, in the service of enforcing productivist logic in general.

But these tactics do not outweigh the fact of an overall inner rigidity that puts the future of techno-capital at grave risk. The name of the crisis is modernity itself, its contingent, c.u.mulative weight. Any regime today is in a situation where every ”solution” only deepens the engulfing problems. More technology and more coercive force are the only resources to fall back on. The ”dark side” of progress stands revealed as the definitive face of modern times.

Theorists such as Giddens and Beck admit that the outer limits of modernity have been reached, so that disaster is now the latent characteristic of society. And yet they hold out hope, without predicating basic change, that all will be well. Beck, for instance, calls for a democratization of industrialism and technological change-carefully avoiding the question of why this has never happened.

There is no reconciliation, no happy ending within this totality, and it is transparently false to claim otherwise. History seems to have liquidated the possibility of redemption; its very course undoes what has been pa.s.sing as critical thought. The lesson is to notice how much must change to establish a new and genuinely viable direction. There never was a moment of choosing; the field or ground of life s.h.i.+fts imperceptibly in a mult.i.tude of ways, without drama, but to vast effect. If the solution were sought in technology, that would of course only reinforce the rule of modern domination; this is a major part of the challenge that confronts us.

Modernity has reduced the scope allowed for ethical action, cutting off its potentially effective outlets. But reality, forcing itself upon us as the crisis mounts, is becoming proximal and insistent once again. Thinking gnaws away at everything, because this situation corrodes everything we have wanted. We realize that it is up to us. Even the likelihood of a collapse of the global techno-structure should not lure us away from acknowledgement of our decisive potential roles, our responsibility to stop the engine of destruction. Pa.s.sivity, like a defeated att.i.tude, will not bring forth deliverance.

We are all wounded, and paradoxically, this estrangement becomes the basis for communality. A gathering of the traumatized may be forming, a spiritual kins.h.i.+p demanding recovery. Because we can still feel acutely, our rulers can rest no more easily than we do. Our deep need for healing means that an overthrow must take place. That alone would const.i.tute healing. Things ”just go on”, creating the catastrophe on every level. People are figuring it out: that things just go on is, in fact, the catastrophe.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson expressed it this way: ”Suddenly now it hits, bizarrely easy to grasp. We are inexorably heading for the Big Goodbye. It's official! The unthinkable is ready to be thought. It is finally in sight, after all of human history behind us. In the pit of what is left of your miserable soul you feel it coming, the definitive loss of home, bigger than the cause of one person's tears. Yours and mine, the private sob, will be joined by a ma.s.s crying......

Misery. Immiseration. Time to get back to where we have never quite given up wanting to be. ”Stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more,” in Spengler's phrase.

Enlightenment thought, along with the industrial Revolution, began in late 18th century Europe, inaugurating modernity. We were promised freedom based on conscious control over our destiny. But Enlightenment claims have not been realized, and the whole project has turned out to be self-defeating. Foundational elements including reason, universal rights and the laws of science were consciously designed to jettison pre-scientific, mystical sorts of knowledge. Diverse, communally sustained lifeways were sacrificed in the name of a unitary and uniform, law-enforced pattern of living. Kant's emphasis on freedom through moral action is rooted in this context, along with the French encyclopedists' program to replace traditional crafts with more up-to-date technological systems. Kant, by the way, for whom propertywas sanctified by no less than his categorical imperative, favorably compared the modern university to an industrial machine and its products.

Various Enlightenment figures debated the pros and cons of emerging modern developments, and these few words obviously cannot do justice to the topic of Enlightenment. However, it may be fruitful to keep this important historical conjunction in mind: the nearly simultaneous births of modern progressive thought and ma.s.s production. Apt in this regard is the perspective of Min Lin: ”Concealing the social origin of cognitive discourses and the idea of certainty is the inner requirement of modern Western ideology in order to justify or legitimate its position by universalizing its intellectual basis and creating a new sacred quasi-transcendance.”$ Modernity is always trying to go beyond itself to a different state, lurching forward as if to recover the equilibrium lost so long ago. It is bent on changing the future-even its own-because it destroys the present. More modernity is needed to heal the wounds modernity inflicts!

With modernity's stress on freedom, modern enlightened inst.i.tutions have in fact succeeded in nothing so much as conformity. Lyotard summed up the overall outcome: ”A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul.”9 Ma.s.sified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the actual control program of modernity.

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