Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous
We Have to Dismantle All This
Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous
The unprecedented reality is one of enormous sorrow and cynicism, "a great tear in the human heart," as Richard Rodriguez put it. A time of ever-mounting everyday horrors, of which any newspaper is full, accompanies a spreading environmental apocalypse. Alienation and the more literal contaminants compete for the leading role in the deadly dialectic of life in divided, technology ridden society. Cancer, unknown before civilization, now seems epidemic in a society increasingly barren and literally malignant.
Soon, apparently, everyone will be using drugs; prescription and illegal becoming a relatively unimportant distinction. Attention Deficit Disorder is one example of an oppressive effort to medicalize the rampant restlessness caused by a life/world ever more shriveled and unfulfilling. The ruling order will inevitably go to any lengths to deny social reality; it's techno-psychiatry views human suffering as chiefly biological in nature and genetic in origin.
New strains of disease, impervious to industrial medicine, begin to spread globally while fundamentalism (Christian, Judaic, Islamic) is also on the rise, a sign of deeply felt misery and frustration. And here at home New Age spirituality (Adorno's "philosophy for dunces") and the countless varieties of "healing" therapies in their delusional pointlessness. To assert that we can bewhole/enlighten/heal within the present madness amounts to endorsing the madness.
The gap between rich and poor is widening in this land of the homeless and the imprisoned. Anger rises and massive denial, cornerstone of the system's survival, is now at least having a troubled sleep. A false world is beginning to get the amount of support it deserves: distrust of public institutions is almost total. But the social landscape seems frozen and the pain of youth is perhaps the greatest of all. It was recently announced (10/94) that the homicide rate among young men ages 15 to 19 more than doubled between 1985 and 1991. Teen suicide is the response of a growing number who evidently cannot imagine maturity in such a place as this.
The overwhelming pervasive culture is a fast-food one, bereft of substance or promise. As Dick Hebdige aptly judged, "the postmodern is the modern without the hopes and dreams that made modernity bearable." Postmodernism advertises itself as pluralistic, tolerant, and non-dogmatic. In practice it is a superficial, fast-forward, deliberately confused, fragmented, media obsessed, illiterate, fatalistic, uncritical excrescence, indifferent to questions of origins, agency, history or causation. It questions nothing of importance and is the perfect expression of a setup that is stupid and dying and wants to take us with it.
Our post modern epoch finds its bottom line expression in consumerism and technology; which combine in the stupefying force of mass media. Attention getting, easily digested images and phrases distract one from the fact that this horror show of domination is precisely held together by such entertaining, easily digested images and phrases. Even the grossest failures of society can be used to try to narcoticize its subjects, as with the case of violence, a source of endless diversion. We are titillated by the representation of what at the same time is threatening, suggesting that boredom is an even worse torment than fear.
Nature, what is left of it, that is, serves as a bitter reminder of how deformed, non-sensual, and fraudulent is contemporary existence. The death of the natural world and the technological penetration of every sphere of life, what is left of it, proceed with accelerating impetus. Wired, Mondo 2000, zippies, cyber-everything, virtual reality, Artificial Intelligence, on and on, up to and including Artificial Life, the ultimate post modern science.
Meanwhile, however, our post-industrial computer age has resulted in the fact that we are now more than ever "appendages to the machine," as the 19th century phrase had it. Bureau of Justice statistics (7/94), by the way, report that the increasingly computer surveiled workplace is now the setting for nearly one million violent crimes per year, and that the number of murdered bosses has doubled in the past decade.
This hideous arrangement expects, in its arrogance that its victims will somehow remain content to vote, recycle, and pretend it will all be fine. To employ a line from Debord, "The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing and deserve nothing." Civilization, technology, and a divided social order are the components of an indissoluble whole, a death trip that is fundamentally hostile to qualitative difference. Our answer must be qualitative, not the quantitative, more-of-the same palliatives that actually reinforce what we must end.