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Wild Singularity

Adbusters — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:55:00 +0000

The moment we cannot escape.

by Shane Adair

Spooky was a wild black cat with yellow eyes. She was taken off a farm and given to my older sister as a gift. I remember thinking about her all day at school. My brother and I would run home after school to play with Spooky. We trained her right from the beginning. We would wrestle with her and get her riled up. Then she would grab a hold of our arms and bite us. As time went on her jaw got stronger.

One game we played with her was called “Barry in the Backfield.” This game consisted of two players. I was on one team and my younger brother was my opponent. Spooky was a neutral player. She was the all time running back and I was the quarterback. My brother kneeled across from us as a defender. Then I would say,

“Blue forty-two, blue forty-two, set hut.”

And I’d turn around and set Spooky on the floor. As soon as she hit the floor she’d take off around me and attempt to run around my brother. If my brother were able to tackle Spooky, I would get no points. If Spooky ran around my brother and off somewhere, I would get seven points. I don’t think we ever finished a game.

My older brother had his own way of training Spooky. He would hold a towel perpendicular to the floor, and Spooky would run at the towel. As she got close to the towel she would jump and clench her jaw into the towel. After some time she learned to lock her jaw into the towel and hang. My brother would shake the towel and try to make her fall, but she wouldn’t.

One gray and rainy day our family sat around the living room watching television. All of a sudden we heard this loud high-pitched shriek come from upstairs. It sounded like a girl in a horror movie walking into a room to find a bloodied corpse on the floor. Concerned, we yelled up the stairs to make sure sister was all right.

“Tina, what happened? Are you all right?’

“No. Someone come get this cat.”

My brothers and I ran upstairs. We walked into the bathroom and saw sister wrapped in a towel. Spooky had her claws dug into the towel and was climbing up our sister.

My older brother said, “Thataway Spooky. She’s learning.”

“She sure is,” I said.

“Get her off of me.”

“Okay, okay.”

We got her off of sister and brought her downstairs to the living room. My brothers and I laughed.

Spooky continued to grow until she was full-grown. When she stopped growing she was quite the cat. She looked like a miniature panther. She was large and very muscular. When she walked you could see her different muscles flexing.

At one point in time I believe our teachers began to worry about us. My younger brother and I would show up to school with a new scratch on our faces everyday. The worst one was on my younger brother. Spooky got him right under the eye and all the way down to his chin. He was lucky she didn’t get his eye.

After some time of getting beat up we began to learn. We learned we had to carry a blanket and a pillow. First you hit Spooky with the pillow then you threw the blanket on top. That gave you just enough time to get away. Every morning when I woke I’d grab my pillow and blanket. Then I’d crack the door open and look both ways to see if Spooky was around. If I didn’t see her, I’d run as fast as I could up the stairs and she’d dart out of some corner and chase me. When I got to the top of the stairs I’d slam the door and lock it. Spooky’s head would bounce off the door, then her paws would reach under. If she was there waiting right outside of the door, I’d have to use the pillow and blanket.

In the summertime the weather would be very hot and humid. And when there was nothing else to do, my younger brother, a friend and I would come looking for Spooky. She was the biggest and toughest cat in the neighborhood. She was usually good for some entertainment. One time the three of us were messing around one way or another when I heard loud hissing and growling. I ran around to the side of the house to see Spooky and another cat squaring off.

“Kevin, Larry, hurry up.”

They ran around to the side of the house, and the three of us began cheering Spooky on.

“Get her Spooky, get her.”

The two cats stood facing each other growling and hissing. After a minute or two the other cat tried to run around Spooky. When the cat got to Spooky’s side, Spooky pounced on her and got a hold of her neck. Her jaw clenched and locked. It was just like the towel drill. The other cat shook and tried to whip Spooky loose, but she wouldn’t budge. Her jaw was locked, and the rest of her body whipped back and forth like a flag. We saw blood start to gush out of the neck, and then Spooky let her go. The other cat wobbled off scraggily and Spooky watched her closely.

The following year Spooky got into many fights. If we heard the hissing and growling sound, we knew what was happening. She got us through some very slow times. Then one day she came home and didn’t look so good. A chunk of her head was bitten off and her eye was all bloodshot. A new cat was in the neighborhood, and this cat was twice the size of Spooky and twice as tough. For a long time Spooky was the biggest and toughest cat in the neighborhood. But shortly after she got beaten up, we never saw Spooky again.

Political Therapy

Adbusters — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:30:00 +0000

The art of mass disassociation.

by Franco Berardi Bifo

From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?

Nick Whalen

What if society can no longer resist the destructive effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating power of financial accumulation?

We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that, we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of energolatria, a cult of energy, has dominated the cultural sense of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force.

When workers were strong in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish: they enact it. They make things happen; they invest, disinvest, displace; they destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays?

The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias?

Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean renouncing it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force.

When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work within the world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class.

The age of modem social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it’s hard to imagine how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator state, the heir of the Enlightenment and socialism, has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social equilibrium. When, at the end of a ferocious class struggle between labor and capital – and within the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying legal regulation and transforming social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble.

I anticipate that scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. They’ll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. Just as the long wave of counterglobalization’s moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.

The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones) will be a peaceful process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the mass ignorance produced by media totalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect.

We cannot predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of nonconfrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It’s impossible to predict what should be done in the case of unwanted conflict. A nonviolent response is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of well-being with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech low-energy methods – while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming years. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicky because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss their dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way to a happy adaptation. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The development of autonomy is not totalizing or intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it should be considered an unending process.

Franco Bifo Berardi is a revolutionary Italian philosopher and activist. This essay originally appeared in his newly translated book, After the Future.

Spiritual Insurrection

Adbusters — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

The ultimate culture jam.

by Adbusters

From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?

Emilio Morenatti/AP Images

This article is available in:

We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

The Age of Consequences

Adbusters — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:19:20 +0000

Gaia in turmoil.

by David Abram

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Kenneth Bok

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Today, as Earth shivers into a fever – the planetary climate rapidly warming as oil-drunk civilization burns up millions of years of stored sunlight in the course of a few decades – clearly the felt temper of the atmosphere is shifting, becoming more extreme. As local weather patterns fluctuate and transform in every part of the globe, the excessive moodiness of the medium affects the mental climate in which creatures confront one another, lending its instability to human affairs as well. Our human exchanges – whether between persons or between nations – easily become more agitated and turbulent, apt to flare into storms of blame, anger and war as the disquietude in the land translates into a generalized fearfulness among the population, a trepidation, readiness to take offence or to lash out without clear cause.

Indeed the propensity for random violence becomes more pronounced whenever the sources of stress are unrecognized, whenever a tension is felt whose locus or source remains hidden. And as long as we deny the animate life of the Earth itself – as long as we arrogate all subjectivity to ourselves, forgetting the sentience in the air, and the manifold intelligence in the land – then we’ll remain oblivious to what’s really unfolding, unable to quell the agitation in ourselves because we’re blind to the deeper distress.

For the possibility of a human future, and for our own basic sanity, we need to acknowledge that we’re not the sole bearers of meaning in this world, that our species is not the only locus of feeling afoot in the real. To weather the changes now upon us, we must become ever more attentive to the more-than-human field of experience, consulting the creatures and the old local farmers, comparing notes with neighbors, learning the seasonal cycles of our terrain even as we notice new alterations in those cycles. Listening at once outward and inward, observing the shifts in the animate landscape while tracking the transformations unfolding within us – in this way we weave ourselves back into the fabric of our world.

The violence and disarray of the coming era, its social injustices and its wars will have their deepest source in systemic stresses already intensifying within the broader body of the biosphere. Yet such system-wide strains cannot be alleviated by scapegoating other persons, or by inflicting violence on other peoples. They can be eased only by strengthening the wild resilience of the Earth, preserving and replenishing whatever we can of the planet’s once-exuberant biotic diversity while bringing ourselves (and our communities) into greater alignment with the particular ecologies that we inhabit. Acknowledging that human awareness is sustained by the broader sentience of the Earth; noticing that each bioregion has its own style of sentience; observing the manner in which the collective mood of a terrain alters with every change in weather: such are a few of the ways whereby we can nudge ourselves toward such an alignment.

The era of human arrogance is at an end; the age of consequences is upon us. The presumption that mind was exclusively a human property exemplified the very arrogance that has now brought the current biosphere to the very brink of the abyss. It led us to take the atmosphere entirely for granted, treating what was once known as the most mysterious and sacred dimension of life (called Sila, the wind-mind of the world, by the Inuit; Nilch’i, or Holy Wind, by the Navajo; Ruach, or rushing-spirit, by the ancient Hebrews) as a conveniently invisible dumpsite for the toxic by-products of industrial civilization.

The resulting torsions within the planetary climate are at last forcing humankind out of its self-enclosed oblivion – a dynamic spoken of, in psychoanalysis, as “the return of the repressed.” Only through the extremity of the weather are we brought to notice the uncanny power and presence of the unseen medium, and so compelled to remember our thorough immersion within the life of this breathing planet. Only thus are we brought to realize that our vaunted human intelligence is as nothing unless it’s allied with the round intelligence of the animate Earth.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon Books, 2010). He lives in the foothills of the southern Rockies. This piece is excerpted from an essay that originally appeared in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis.

The Fairy Tale

Adbusters — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:21:46 +0000

More choices than you can dream of.

by Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Beth Yarnelle Edward

Your mom tells you a story before you go to bed and you believe it. She tells you that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. She says that you are a unique and valuable individual and that you are to never forget it. She says that you are very lucky and the world is your oyster. And she is right. You live in an exceptional time. You will travel greater distances in a single day than most people only a century ago traveled their entire lives. You will have food choices that English kings and Ottoman princes couldn’t have imagined. You will casually flood your system to the point of illness with sugar, once the currency of the world and the prize of empires. You will live longer than any generation before. Your wardrobe will contain cloth from what was once beyond the reaches of the greatest civilizations. Broken bones won’t render you a cripple. If you were born a girl you can become a boy. If you were born a boy you can become a girl. You can break tradition without death. You can upgrade your biology and change your organs. You can assume any identity you wish. Her words comfort you into a wonderful sleep. She is careful not to explain that this oyster isn’t for all the children of the world or that such good fortune is making the Earth sick.

That would ruin the story.

—Darren Fleet

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Peak Nature

Admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:01:00 +0000

Capitalism has no soul.

by Timothy Morton

From Adbusters #98: American Autumn

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Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata. You can scour the Earth from mountaintop to Marianas Trench. You will never find Nature. That’s why I put it in capitals. I want the reader to see that it’s an empty category looking for something to fill it. Gray goo.

Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that preexists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it: standing reserve, Bestand.

Bestand means “stuff,” as in the old ad from the 1990s, “Drink Pepsi: Get Stuff.” There is an ontology implicit in capitalist production, then, that is strictly materialism as defined by Aristotle. Funnily enough, however, this materialism is not fascinated with material objects in all their manifold specificity. It’s just stuff. This viewpoint is the basis of Aristotle’s problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or handled matter? Have you ever held a piece of “stuff”? Sure, I’ve seen lots of objects: Santa Claus in a department store, snowflakes and photographs of atoms. But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such? Aristotle says it’s a bit like searching through a zoo to find the “animal” rather than the various species such as monkeys and mynah birds. Marx says exactly the same thing regarding capital. “The ‘expanded’ form [of the commodity] passes into the ‘general’ form when some commodity is excluded, exempted from the collection of commodities, and thus appears as the general equivalent of all commodities, as the immediate embodiment of Commodity as such, as if, by the side of all real animals, there existed the Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom – or as if, to use an example from commercial capitalism, by the side of all real spices, there existed the Spice.” As Nature goes, so goes matter. The two most progressive physical theories of our age, ecology and quantum theory, need have nothing to do with it.

What is bestand? Bestand is stockpiling. Gallon after gallon of oil waiting to be tapped. Row upon row of big box houses waiting to be inhabited. Terabyte after terabyte of memory waiting to be filled. Stockpiling is the art of the zeugma – the yoking of things you hear in phrases such as “wave upon wave” or “bumper to bumper.” Stockpiling is the dominant mode of social existence. Giant parking lots empty of cars, huge tables in restaurants across which you can’t hold hands, vast empty lawns. Nature is stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. The Rocky Flats nuclear bomb trigger factory was sited precisely to evoke this kind of mountainous stockpile. The eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the ways in which we still believe that Nature is “over there” – that it exists apart from technology, apart from history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of stockpiles.

So again, I ask, what exactly are we sustaining when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out of control system that sucks in gray goo at one end and pushes out gray value at the other. It’s Natural goo, Natural value. Result? Mountain ranges of inertia, piling higher every year, while humans boil away in the agony of uncertainty. Just take a look at Manufactured Landscapes: the ocean of telephone dials, dials as far as the eye can see, somewhere in China. A real ocean – it lies there at this very moment.

Societies embody philosophies. Actually, what we have in modernity is much, much worse than just instrumentality. Here we must depart from Heidegger. What’s worse is the location of essence in some beyond, away from any specific existence. To this extent, capitalism is itself Heideggerian! Whether we call it scientism, deconstruction, relationism or just good old-fashioned Platonic forms, there is no essence in what exists. Either the beyond is itself nonexistent (deconstruction, nihilism), or it’s some kind of real away from “here.” The problem, then, is not essentialism but this very notion of a beyond. Think of what Tony Hayward said. He said that the Gulf of Mexico was a huge ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don’t want to quibble about the relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would somehow have gotten it into Hayward’s thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward’s assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t worry. The beyond will take care of it.

Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite gray goo, real things writhe and smack into one another. Some leap out because industry malfunctions, or functions only too well. Oil bursts out of its ancient sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of plutonium for 24,000 years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the heat from the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials grows ever larger. Paradoxically, capitalism has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.

Modern life presents us with a choice:

1) The essence of things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, Being).

2) There is no essence. (At present I believe that the restriction of rightness and coolness to this choice is one reason why planet Earth is in big trouble right now. And I believe that the choice resembles a choice between grayish brown and brownish gray). That’s why I believe in a third choice:

3) There is an essence, and it’s right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn.

And that’s why I believe we are entering a new era of academic work, where the point will not be to one-up each other by appealing to the trace of the givenness of the openness of the clearing of the lighting of the being of the pencil. Thinking past “meta mode” will at least bring us up to speed with the weirdness of things, a weirdness that evolution, ecology, relativity and quantum theory all speak about. This weirdness resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them.

When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “away.” Marx was partly wrong, then, when in The Communist Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn’t see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back into the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects. This oozing real comes back and can no longer be ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly “gone and forgotten,” there, look! There it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the surface, square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean. The cosmic U-bend is no more. It can’t be gone and forgotten – even ABC News knows that now.

When I hear the word “sustainability” I reach for my sunscreen.

The End of the World

When Neo touches a mirror in The Matrix it adheres to his hand, instantly changing from reflective surface to viscous substance. The very thing that we use to reflect becomes an object in its own right, liquid and dark like oil in the dim light of the room in which Neo has taken the red pill. The usual reading of this scene is that Neo’s reality is dissolving. If we stay on the level of the sticky, oily mirror, however, we obtain an equally powerful reading. It’s not reality that dissolves, but the subject, the very capacity to “mirror” things, to be separate from the world like someone looking at a reflection in a mirror – removed from it by an ontological sheet of reflective glass. The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity (I’m thinking here of the work of Ortega y Gasset, Levinas and Graham Harman). Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there it is, impossible to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what they reflect. In its ingenuous sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him.

The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because of hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The Greeks called it miasma, the way blood-guilt sticks to you.

Why objects, why now? The philosopher Graham Harman writes that, because they withdraw irreducibly, you can’t even get closer to objects. This becomes clearer as we enter the ecological crisis – “How far in are we?” This anxiety is a symptom of the emergence of hyperobjects. When you approach them, more and more objects emerge. It’s like being in a dream written by Zeno. This strange paradox becomes clearer as we enter the age of ecological crisis – “Has it started yet? How far in are we?” is the question on all our lips, precisely because we are in it, precisely because it has started.

It’s November 2010. You are waiting at a bus stop. Someone else ambles up. “Nice weather, isn’t it?” she asks.

You pause for a moment. You wonder whether she is only saying that to distract you from the latest news about global warming. You decide she isn’t.

“Yes,” you say. But your reply holds something back – the awareness that for you it’s not a particularly nice day because you’re concerned that the heat and the moisture have to do with global warming. This holding back may or may not be reflected in your tone.

“Mind you,” she says. “Oh, here it comes,” you think. “Funny weather last week, wasn’t it? I blame global warming.”

We all have conversations that are more or less like that now. Just as after 9/11 objects to which we may have paid attention – an X-Acto knife, some white powder – suddenly gained a terrible significance, so in an age of global warming the weather – that nice neutral backdrop that you can talk about with a stranger, in that nice neutral backdrop-y way we might call phatic (after Roman Jakobson) – has taken on a menacing air.

In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an ellipsis.

This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological shift in human awareness. Which in turn is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac knows, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of humanists such as ourselves to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to help explain it.

What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are living “in” a world – one that for instance we can call Nature – no longer exists in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don’t want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of Hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been going on now since as long as the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.

As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more threatening, is now looming on our horizon – looming so as to abolish our horizon, or any horizon, in fact. Global warming, the consequence of runaway fossil fuel burning (as we all know ad nauseam), has performed a radical shift in the status of the weather. Why? Because the world as such – not just a certain idea of world but world in its entirety – has evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in the first place.

We could explain this in terms of the good old-fashioned Aristotelian view of substance and accident. I’m sure you are familiar with the idea that for Aristotle, a realist, there are substances that happen to have various qualities or accidents that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. In section Epsilon 2 of the Metaphysics Aristotle outlines the differences between substances and accidents. What climate change has done is shift the weather from accidental to substantial. Here’s Aristotle:

Suppose, for instance, that in the season of the Cynosure [the dog days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heatwave, we would not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case.

But these sorts of violent changes are exactly what global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a potential symptom of a substance, global warming. So all of a sudden this wet stuff falling on my head is a mere feature of some much more sinister phenomenon that I can’t see with my naked human eyes. I need terabytes of RAM and extreme processing speed to model it in real time (they were just able to do this in spring 2008).

There is an even spookier problem with Aristotle’s arctic summer. If those arctic summers continue in any way, and if we can model them as symptoms of global warming, it is the case that there never was a genuine, meaningful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real because it kept on repeating for say two or three millennia. Global warming, in other words, plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a reliable world was actually just a habitual pattern – a collusion between forces such as sunshine and moisture and us humans expecting such things at certain regular intervals and giving them names, such as dog days. We took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more withdrawn – climate. As Harman argues, “world” is always presence-at-hand – a mere caricature of some real object. What Ben Franklin and others in the Romantic period discovered was not really weather, but rather a toy version of this real object, a toy that ironically started to unlock the door to the real thing.

Strange weather patterns and carbon emissions caused scientists to start monitoring things that at first only appeared locally significant. That’s the old school definition of climate: there’s the climate in Peru, the climate on Long Island, but climate in general, climate as the totality of derivatives of weather events – in much the same way as inertia is a derivative of velocity – climate as such is a beast newly recognized via the collaboration of weather, scientists, satellites, government agencies, and so on. This beast includes the sun, since it’s infrared heat from the sun that is trapped by the greenhouse effect of gases such as CO2. So global warming is a colossal entity that includes entities that exist way beyond Earth’s atmosphere and yet it affects us intimately, right here and now. Global warming is a prime example of what I am calling a hyperobject, an object that is massively distributed in space-time and that radically transforms our ideas of what an object is. It covers the entire surface of Earth and most of the effects extend up to 500 years into the future. Remember what life was like in 1510?

You are walking on top of lifeforms. Your car drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earth’s crust is distributed bacterial excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms.

The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it’s already here. It is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the “end of the world” are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic space.

If there is no background – no neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climate – then there is no foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, for instance, tucked up like little hobbits in the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning (Heideggerian Dasein for instance) falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction. Worlds need horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere, when I can Google Earth the fish in my mom’s pond in her garden in London, the world – as a significant, bounded, horizoning entity – disappears. We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery for us, as backdrops, have dissolved.

World turns out to be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from an entity’s ignorance concerning objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight” is a charming old saw that evokes days when shepherds lived in worlds, worlds bounded by horizons on which things occurred such as red sunsets. The sun goes down, the sun comes up – of course now we know it doesn’t, so Galileo and Copernicus tore big holes in that particular notion of world. Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You can’t see or smell climate. Given our brains’ processing power, we can’t even really think about it all that concretely. You could say then that we still live in a world, only massively upgraded. True, but now world means significantly less than it used to – it doesn’t mean “significant for humans” or even “significant for conscious entities.”

A simple experiment demonstrates plainly that world is an aesthetic phenomenon. I call it The Lord of the Rings vs. The Ball Popper test. For this experiment you will need a copy of the second part of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You will also require a Playskool Busy Ball Popper, made by Hasbro.

Now play the scene that I consider to be the absolute nadir of horror, when Frodo, captured by Faramir, is staggering around the bombed-out city Osgiliath when a Nazgul (a Ringwraith) attacks on a “fell beast,” a terrifying winged dragon-like creature.

Switch on the ball popper. You will notice the inane tunes that the popper plays instantly undermine the coherence of Peter Jackson’s narrative world.

The idea of world depends upon all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous meaninglessness. It’s the job of serious Wagnerian worlding to erase the trace of this meaninglessness. Jackson’s trilogy surely is Wagnerian, a total work of art or Gesamkunstwerk in which elves, dwarves and men have their own languages, their own tools, their own architecture – this is done to fascist excess as if they were different sports teams. But it’s easy to recover the trace of meaninglessness from this seamless world – absurdly easy, as the toy experiment proves.

Stupid Kids’ Toy 5, Wagnerian Tolkien Movie Nil. What can we learn from this? “World,” a key concept in ecophenomenology, is an illusion. And objects for sure have a hidden weirdness. In effect, the Stupid Kids’ Toy “translated” the movie, clashing with it and altering it in its own limited and unique way.

In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to the building of a solar array in a park in 2008 because it didn’t look “natural.” Objections to wind farms are similar – not because of the risk to birds, but because they “spoil the view.” A 2008 plan to put a wind farm near a remote Scottish island was, well, scotched, because residents of the island complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology, and a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature. How come a wind turbine is less beautiful than an oil pipeline? How come it “spoils the view” any more than pipes and roads?

You could see turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size and magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the sublime (rather than the beautiful). But it’s an ethical sublime that says, “We humans choose not to use carbon” – a choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps it’s this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice, rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed “landscape” (a word for a painting, not actual trees and water). (And now of course there are wind spires, which do reproduce a kind of aesthetic distance common in landscape painting.) As a poster in the office of Mulder in The X-Files used to say: the truth is out there. Ideology is not just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke bottle. It’s in the way some things appear “natural” – rolling hills and greenery – as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred. These fake landscapes are the original greenwashing. What the Scots are saying, in objecting to wind farms, is not “Save the environment!” but “Leave our dreams undisturbed!” World is an aesthetic construct that depends on things like underground oil and gas pipelines. A profound political act would be to choose another aesthetic construct, one that doesn’t require smoothness and distance and coolness.

Standard ecological criticism depends upon different concepts of “world.” Indeed, it derives this concept from philosophical thinking about climate, for instance in the proto-nationalist thinking of Humboldt and Herder, or from biological racism that says that I’m white because I was born in a northern climate. This concept is by no means doing what it should to help ecological criticism. Indeed, the more we see and know about ecology, as is inevitable in an era of ecological crisis, the more of that sheer meaninglessness we have. What an irony: the more data we have, the less it signifies a coherent world.

It’s Heidegger, more than anyone else, who generates the concept of world for contemporary ecological philosophy and cultural analysis. In particular, in “The Question Concerning Technology” and “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” world is what is created or “enframed” by equipment. This definition has given rise to the now pervasive doctrine of “worlding,” whereby cultural artifacts embody the world in various ways: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, as they say.

Now for a kick off, there are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept altogether, it shouldn’t be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this: witch-ducking stools constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a wonderful world of witch-ducking in the Middle Ages. Witch-ducking stools constituted a world for their users in every meaningful sense. There is for sure a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesn’t mean we should be preserving it. So the argument that “It’s good because it constitutes a world” is, to use the technical term, bogus. The reasoning that one should not interfere with the environment because doing so interferes with someone’s or something’s world is nowhere near a good enough reason. It may even have pernicious consequences. So I’m afraid we must part with Donna Haraway, whose ethics insists that nonhumans are worthy of our care and respect because they constitute worlds, they are in the worlding business. I part company with Haraway here, just as she parts with me, since she thinks that what I’m proposing by contrast is “exterminism” – getting entities oven-ready for destruction. To which I reply, how can you get an entity that doesn’t exist ready for destruction?

The second area of concern is historical, namely the way in which current ecological crises such as global warming and the sixth mass extinction event have thrown into sharp relief the notion of world. It is as if humans are losing their world, and their idea of world (including the idea that they ever had one), at one and the same time. This is at best highly disorienting. In this historical moment, the concept world is thrown into sharp relief by circumstances demanding conscious human intervention. Working to transcend our notion of world is important at this moment. Like a mannerist painting that stretches the rules of classicism to breaking point, global warming has stretched our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a very good reason. This is simply because no entity at all has a world, or as Graham Harman puts it, “there is no such thing as a ‘horizon.’”

Let’s think about one way in which global warming abolishes the idea of a horizon. This would be the timescales involved – yes, timescales in the plural. There are three of them. We could call these, in turn, the frightening, the horrifying, and the petrifying.

1) Frightening timescale. It will take several hundred years for cold ocean waters (assuming there are any) to absorb about 75% of the excess CO2.

2) Horrifying timescale. It will then take another 30,000 years or so for most of the remaining 25% to be absorbed by igneous rocks. The half-life of plutonium is 24,100 years.

3) Petrifying timescale. The final 7% will be around 100,000 years from now.

There is a real sense in which “forever” is far easier on the mind than these very large timescales, what I call very large finitude. Hyperobjects produce very large finitude, scales of time and space that are finite and for that reason humiliatingly difficult for humans to visualize. Forever makes you feel important. But 100,000 years makes you wonder whether you can imagine 100,000 anything. It seems rather abstract to imagine that a book, for instance, is 100,000 words long.

The “world” as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesn’t exist.

What is left if we aren’t the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul, as it were – the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Our era is witness to the emergence of a renewed Aristotelianism, an object-oriented ontology that thinks essence is right here, not in some beyond. It’s precisely the magical amazement of things like stones, beetles, doors, red hot chili peppers, Nirvana, Bob Geldof, quasars and cartoon characters in the shape of Richard Nixon’s head that truly has to be explained, not explained away. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history … and the end of the human dream that reality is significant for humans alone. Let us welcome the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and nonhumans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world.

Timothy Morton is a key thinker in the emerging philosophical field of Object-Oriented Ontology. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard University Press, 2007) and seven other books. He blogs regularly at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

Rural > City > Cyberspace

Adbusters — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:01:00 +0000

The Biggest Migration In Human History.

by Nicholas Carr

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Lao P. Xia Xiaowan

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A series of psychological studies over the past 20 years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.

The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous and mentally fatiguing series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.

The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.”

There is no Sleepy Hollow on the internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street. The stimulations of the web, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We wouldn’t want to give them up. But they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily, as Hawthorne understood, overwhelm all quieter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is the one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.

It’s not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion. Psychologists have long studied how people experience fear and react to physical threats, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun researching the sources of our nobler instincts. What they’re finding is that, as Antonio Damasio, the director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, explains, the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that “are inherently slow.” In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain – when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously – the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain “to transcend immediate involvement of the body” and begin to understand and to feel “the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation.”

The experiment, say the scholars, indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. “For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” cautions Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a member of the research team. “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.” It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that as the net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.

There are those who are heartened by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the web’s intellectual ethic. “Technological progress does not reverse,” writes a Wall Street Journal columnist, “so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue.” We need not worry, though, because our “human software” will in time “catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible.” We’ll “evolve” to become more agile consumers of data. The writer of a cover story in New York magazine says that as we become used to “the 21st-century task” of “fitting” among bits of online information, “the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.” We may lose our capacity “to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end,” but in recompense we’ll gain new skills, such as the ability to “conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media.” A prominent economist writes, cheerily, that “the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores.” An Atlantic author suggests that our “technology-induced ADD” may be “a short-term problem,” stemming from our reliance on “cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow.” Developing new cognitive habits is “the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”

These writers are certainly correct in arguing that we’re being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it’s a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.”

It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.

Nicholas Carr is the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. He is well-known for his cover article in The Atlantic which asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He explored this question in more depth in his latest book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr lives in Colorado and blogs at roughtype.com

Zyprexa

Adbusters — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:28:31 +0000

An American psychosis.

by Robert Whitaker

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Rin Zebramädchen

Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep 12–14 hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged.

Many gain huge amounts of weight – 20, 40, 60, and even 100 pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness – including young children and teenagers – become diabetic in very short order. Reports of patients occasionally dying from pancreatitis appear in the medical literature. Newspapers and magazines fill their pages with accounts of this new scourge, which is dubbed metabolic dysfunction illness, and parents are in a panic over the thought that their children might contract this horrible disease. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain – dopaminergic, serotoninergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure. Now, such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly’s best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.

Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America..