Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

Hell’s Kitchen (Scrap 2)

“The meaning of a word is its use.” (W) If a thing’s definition is provided by the context of its perception, then in the mass media what you have – the infotainment picture - is a context that is no context at all.  A McDonalds on the Moon would be much the same as the McDonalds in Bluewater, which is the same as …  Food without context.  The food in a supermarket has no season.  No locale defines it; no provenance is visible.  This kind of experience resonates with us.  Life becomes like a fantasy.  Detached, dissociated.  Fragmented.  So with news items.  Something akin to the supermarket experience might happen say in an aircraft hanger with a million post-it notes being blown in sundry directions by a wind machine, some of them occasionally sticking to your forehead or other part of your anatomy … You pick one off look at it - the news of dismay; for it says “REALITY TV” or - unluckier still - DARFUR – or BIRD EXTINCTION – or THE DEAD OCEAN - or (again to get back to the bland and blind) HELL’S KITCHEN.

Reality, context, disappears.

So we seek to replace reality with certainty.

Iraq is in a Postmodern War (Scrap 1)

Taking as our information eidolon Andy Warhol’s screen print cans of soup, as an icon key to the postmodern, we have an information technology that in tendency homogenises reality into a processed information soup - voila! Democracy soup is on the menu.  Some of its effects could be seen in Vietnam.  Politicians found themselves responding to a world made out of streams of videotape.  The ‘information soup’ that Vietnam was ‘communist’ and that on the ‘domino theory’ (dominoes being a kind of information soup of dots, so to speak) everything else would go communist too derived its authenticity from the emulsion of grey grainy film. Reason operated through the logic of a merely visual mist!  We have the same with the ‘war on terror’. That all ‘terrorisms’ are alike. The war is with ‘terrorists’ - the concept seems to need no further definition. It was hoped that by making Iraq ‘democratic’ (another kind of information soup concept) a reverse domino effect would transform the hatred.

Or another blueprint. Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint.  I am thinking of the incident where Gumm comes across an ice cream kiosk that turns out to be not there.  He discovers that what he thought was an ice cream kiosk is actually a kind of psychic construct … Compare the ‘communist threat’. The ice cream kiosk is actually just a small slip of paper with the words ICE CREAM KIOSK printed on it. Looking around, the same applies to everything else. What had been grass is a piece of notepaper saying GRASS. And so forth.  Media reality has in perception become larger than reality itself.  News banners fill our heads and seem to take on the very caste of the ‘things themselves’ in their banal concretisations of the imaginary.  Reality is reduced to the status of a fantasy; a situation that by destroying all sense of limit as real, invites us to think about reality as black and white in order to rediscover those limits.  The result is that we still think according to the categories; we still believe: “Exists”  “Does not exist”, only in the impoverished terms of a gross metaphysical simplification. 

In other words, if you still think that America was dealing with a real enemy in Vietnam, in South America, in the Middle East, that is because your mind set supposes that reality can and should be understood according to categorical opposites - rather than (say) according to the actual facts on the ground. 

In other words, we find the ‘enemy’ by which the state defines itself rendered as an ever more abstract ‘other’. Good and Evil. Clear distinctions are understood!  Yet conceived in categorically inauthentic circumstances.

Not much has changed, one could say.  Greed, fear and arrogance: as of old, the political world remains chaotically imaginary.  But I don’t think this has ever been quite so transparent.  I don’t think there have been as many moments in history as there have recently where the protagonist picks up a piece of paper and realises that here is the reality of the ice cream kiosk he has just bought his ice cream from.

Freedom’s Failure (3)

A modern consumerist society dissolves the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, in the absolutist senses that used to apply to daily human conduct. For the most part rules for living are now informal. I think we would now be shocked by the sorts of social expectations, conformities, and restrictions that existed until quite recently in our society; that we were supposed to take them seriously once would seem monstrous. In this sense, consumerism dissolves narrative in certain very beneficial ways. It seems no longer possible to ‘tell the story of our behaviour’ in so far as it no longer seems to take place against the background of anything. (Which is one reason why we have a reversion to fundamentalisms I think: fundamentalisms of disbelief as in Hitchens, as much as fundamentalisms of belief.) … But now what of this; that since consumerism and consumerist politics have got rid of ‘the story of life’ so completely, what they have created is the simultaneous illusion that therefore nothing is actually happening … Nothing is really taking place.  So that Iraq is kind of a consumerist illusion.  I am not so much suggesting that typically people are oblivious of Iraq – although that might be true too – as suggesting that it seems impossible to imagine that any sort of consequences might come from it; that it might actually make a difference to things, to our life styles, wealth, aspirations and so on.  Really, in the end, we think, it is not going to make a blind bit of difference to real life.  So we just carry on as normal.