A Stroll Through the Galleria

I think the evolution of aesthetics, the changes as they interface with various historical factors is a pretty complex but important discussion. I return again and again and again to the degrading of aesthetic appreciation in today’s consumer culture. What I see, increasingly, is (to borrow from Debord) the colonization of consciousness, and by extension, of public space and *beingness*. That may sound funny, but let me try to tie in this in a bit with your excellent last post. Debord saw daily life as more and more under the control of appearances. The assault on the senses that now is constant and never ending (you cant eat in quiet, or walk the streets without marketing attacks, or even sit in your apartment or back yard without some intrusion) has created a highly anxious state; a state of near paranoia and of preoccupation with consumption. Real civic life has been neutered, and we have instead an obedience to the *spectacle*.

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Now, this spectacle also links to the political domination that we see in the US today. The passive and narcotized public that only looks to keep themselves from the terror of self-reflection. As it dawns on people that the destruction they see around them (since it becomes harder and harder to deny) might be of their own making to some degree, they will intensify the denial and strike out in ever more aggressive behavior. One of the inoculations against this state of dementia is to think historically. Hence, the first thing to be wiped out by the state-apparatus is any notion of history. Post modernism has collaborated in this respect by its endlessly relativistic blather and refusal to discriminate (at least culturally). The reactionaries leap on this to posit their own historical truths (El Salvador was a triumph of democracy, the ***Indians*** just couldn’t adjust to progress, etc etc etc) and if that fails, to simply erase history altogether and write a new adumbrated version (Ronnie Reagan was a great man, etc). History may be a construction, but its a *real* construction and certain facts exist. The Mau Mau revolt was brutally supressed by the British colonial power — that’s the facts. Real people died. Real people suffered. So, ok, we have now a total unreality regards daily life and historical perspective, and it is sustained (for the moment) by the assault of media and marketing. Language is co-opted too, and this is important to think about. The language of resistance is ever more degraded, and so *rigour* in how one expresses the idea of truth is more and more crucial. The barrage of images and solipsistic political rhetoric leaves one in intellectual vertigo, and this is where the minute by minute resistance comes in. This is the starting point for rigour. Bresson cannot be used for bubble gum commercials, because there exists in him a decided purity, a rigour, a profound stating of something that is connected to *Being*. This is the metaphysical dimension of great art. This is also where form enters our discussion (I will return to that later).

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Debord’s often repeated quote; “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”. And when a population has come to believe in image over their own interior lives, we have collective madness. The current state of policing as state policy, of surveillance and supression of dissent, has as one of its goals the erasing of all reflection. What is the logical outcome of this? What is the state going to do in the end when the populace cannot even process the cartoon rhetoric it’s currently using? All traditional learning is gone, all genuine public space is gone, and almost all independent thought is gone. Addiction to processed food, alcohol, and anti depressants, and most profoundly, to robotic consumption and to the viewing of electronic media, has rendered real civic existence extinct. Even psychoanalysis is in the service of adjustment to the insanity. Adjustment to the irrational. So, real art is almost gone, but I think enough lives on to suggest a starting node of resistance. So I wonder at the state and its, perhaps, self-defeating logic. Perhaps you cannot manipulate a population that only can process the very most basic terms of expression. The only direction one can see in all this is for ever more basic and brutal repression and control. A population with ever decreased learning capabilities, with decreased reproductive abilities, and with increased hyper-tension and obesity is going to, eventually, simply collapse under its own weight of unreality and illness. Coupled to this is the environmental crisis. Not a very optimistic picture.

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Now, I should also say, I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of pessimism, of certainty about global warming, etc. There is a great deal science does *not* know. And the logic of total domination has some serious holes in it. And art and culture are part of the problem for the state. What the system of domination responds with is an ever more efficient policing of thought. Recreation as an almost religion is served up daily. Buy this gadget, this iPod, that computer system, buy new trainers or a new dress or a new food processor. Just keep buying! Rudy G. suggested this right after 9-11, don’t despair, just buy. If you don’t buy, the ** terrorists** will win. And in a sense thats true. So capital accumulation is, in some way, in direct opposition to art. Human expression, either collective or individual, has always been connected to a sense or awareness of both of mortality, and to the great *beyond*. (note the trivializing of religion today, and of all metaphysical thought). Science is seen as anti superstition, and art as just mumbo jumbo. I’ve said before that science is a great tool, if left alone and no put in service of the Pentagon and State Department. The current near total dependency of our Imperialist system on war suggests the terminal logic its based on. Trivializing destruction, trivializing death and mayhem, and conducting a media black out on images of pain and suffering (except occasionally the suffering of those inferior Muslims or Africans) is reaching a tipping point (to use a current fashionable term). We can expect more of the current shooting sprees we’ve seen in the US of late. The necrophilic obsessions of our unhappy populace are reaching critical mass. There are so many contradictons and tensions at work. The culture industry is totally compliant to the military and business class, and so is, obviously, marketing. But the image industry also creates ever greater tensions. People can look at super models and Hollywood action heroes and eventually recognize how alien these images really are. How *they* are not like me and my friends as we sit and eat at KFC. We are fat and uneducated and depressed, and we work all the time at meaningless jobs (or sit around watching TV and collecting the few food stamps that remain). The ruling class and subaltern classes are both miserable, for consumption leads only to a terminal state of needing more purchasing, and it doesn’t stop the looming reality of ageing and death. If you cant buy, you are unhappy, and if you CAN buy, you are also miserable.

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The endless worship of authority is linked here, too. The need to keep a military aggressive dynamic in play is essential for the system to function today. Economic oppression and exploitation must be served up on platters of militarism, patriotism, and self adulation. The abstractions of Empire. The *values* of the ruling elite. When one reads Pinter, for example, one hears a voice (more importantly than other qualities in his work) free of the restraints of the dominant discourse. In other words, its outside the *framing* nexus. This is sensed as somehow deviant by the custodians of culture. Better to have token opposition from within the totalized closure of Capital. Tony Kushner say, or Speilberg, or whateverthefuckever Miramax “quality” film (designed as an Oscar showcase). The spectacle must reproduce itself endlessly and in ever shorter times spans. The problem is that psychic fatigue is setting in, and I suspect what we are seeing is the mental crisis of the US population — the final spinning apart of the last frail thread of logic. What happens next is up for debate. Barbarism is one possibility. When I hear the endless demonizing of Muslims, or attacks on supposed threats to the US (Chavez, Castro, Iran, North Korea, etc etc etc) I sense how deep the anger is and how much coiled sweaty rage lurks just under the surface as the robots stroll through the galleria.

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A final radio link on Africa: http://www.taylor-report.com/audio/mp3/Taylor_Report-2007-10-08.mp3

John Steppling