Radical Responsibility

The Postmodern mindset does not preclude an ethical orientation - far from it, as a matter of fact.

Avital Ronell:

Precisely where there's the pretense or claim for ultimate meaning and transparency - precisely where transcendental guarantors are stamping everything as meaningful, when no one needs to do the anxious guesswork of how to behave or what to do - that's when you are not called upon to be strenuously responsible, because the grammar of being, or the axiom of taking care of the Other, is spelled out for you. According to several registers of traditional ethics, things are pre-scripted, they're prescribed. You know everything that you are supposed to do; it's all more or less mapped out for you. What becomes difficult and terrifying, and what requires infinite translation of a situation or of the distress of the world, is when you don't have those sure markers. You don't have the guarantee of ultimate meaning or the final reward or the last judgement and must enter into unsolvable calculations, searing doubts. Anyone who's sure of themselves, of their morals and intentions, is not truly ethical, is not struggling heroically with the mandate of genuine responsibility. It is impossible ever to be fully responsible enough - you've never given or offered or done enough for those suffering, for the poor, for the hungry. That's a law shared by Dostoyevsky, Levinas, and Derrida: one never meets one's responsible quota, which is set at an infinite bar (hence the invention of the figure of Christ, our infinite creator).

You know, Plato created hell (thank you, Plato!) because he thought the citizens weren't up to the level of philosophical rigor. Why don't we invent hell, he offered, and give them a sense of this infantile punishment resort, or last resort, and let's add heaven - although he didn't occupy himself with heaven too much. It was hell that was supposed to strike fear into the citizens of the polis. And we still have that kind of habit of reverting to very simplistic and fantastical models that are supposed to keep people doing the right thing, keep their blinders on and fear factors in gear. But when those are lifted and you remember that it was a myth, a fiction, meant to scare people into behaving themselves and there's no clear prescribed remedial directive that you are supposed to follow, and there's no parental guidance on any level of being, then you are on your own. That's more work than having this kind of prefab superego-transmission system telling you "That's bad. That's good."

Regardless the efficacy of these thoughts, this is a clear picture of radical responsibility.

It should also be pointed out that, in spite of Ronell's anti-religious bias, religious thought itself does not preclude radical responsibility . . . though, in practice, that often seems to be the case. It's sort of a Philosophy 101 "so/necessarily so" problem: religious thought can take the form of a deep, never-ending personal quest for values, but more often seems to be a search for rules to live by, rules which relieve one of the responsibility for realizing one's own actions.

from Examined Life, edited by Astra Taylor

The Death of Everything

1.

Burroughs: "Tear it down, tear it down, tear it all down!"

actually it was "Take it back, take it back, take it all back!", but who's keeping track? Bogus attribution and outright lying is the chic literary device of the first quarter of the 21st century. If this seems like a week attempt then it's because I've come unstuck in time.

2.

This is the death of everything. The title reeks of berets and Sartre, of pretension so mundane it's become a Halloween costume. It's like

DEATH

"oooohhh, scary . . . who the fuck are you trying to kid and/or impress?"

There's the big death, and there's the little death. And a few deaths in between. It's virtually meaningless to talk about death, the big empty. Death is too big; death stands in for its own meaning.

Or not.

3.

I call this blog the death of everything because I want it to be, in a sense, a series of endings. I perceive life/reality as a cycle, a series of cycles, a group of cycles, whatever . . . but unlike circles, there's no smooth continuum, and unlike spirals, there's no controlled (or, sometimes, even logical) motion. As such, you can point at any moment and say "that's the end! DEATH!" and you would be right. Or, you could say "that's the beginning! BIRTH!" and be correct as well. It's all a matter of perspective, you see?

Problem is, everyone wants to be RIGHT. It doesn't work that way. The circles have flat spots, the spirals are less spirals than they are a careening about in scenery that is occasionally familiar, occasionally not.

This is life beyond mathematics, spiritual or actual . . .

4.

Everyone wants a new beginning without an ending. Birth without death.

But it doesn't work that way.

So, lacking rebirth without pain, they choose the status quo. Problem is, there is no such thing as a status quo. Everything is always changing.

You get up every morning at the same time. You eat the same thing for breakfast - say, a bowl of Cheerios. Every day. Same time.

But today, it rains. Yesterday it snowed. The sun will be out tomorrow.

The president got shot. Someone flew airplanes into a large building.

You had sex.

Nothing is ever really the same. But

5.

Somehow, it is. Sartre tries to convince us that just because the sun rose in the east yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday ad infinitum, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will rise in the east again tomorrow.

Sure. I can buy that. But nobody ever lost money betting that the sun would rise in the east.

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."

God, how I hate the old saws, but this one's apropos. It's the spiral, the careening about in scenery familiar and unfamiliar. It's a life of deja vu.

"It takes money to make money."

Less apropos, but I was thinking of Green on Red for some reason, and that line from one of their songs just came insistently barging through. But wait: not so beside the point, it turns out. Because if you expand it to

"Power serves naught but power."

then you are getting closer to the point.

Money serves money. Power serves power. The status quo exists solely to project itself into infinity.

And that, friends, is the source of everything that is burning up our world: the enormous resource drain to power the continual return of the status quo. I don't mean that strictly in the environmental sense (though, indeed, that applies), but a macroeconomic sense, if economy here is expanded to mean the sum total of all exchange. You see, entropy is the natural tendency of the universe

(everything falls apart)

, and it takes energy (or applied energy = power) to fight against the entropy. So, the more mass a given film clip/reality attains, the more power (energy) it takes to maintain the status quo, like holding an ocean liner at anchor. Turns out the status quo is not the mundane, same-old-same-old; but rather, a raging inferno, a nuclear implosion, and energy sink that swallows up everything in its wake.

Entropy, on the other hand, is zen-like. Sometimes horrible, sometimes violent

(ultimate entropy separates atom from atom, fractures nuclei, sends electrons careening from orbit)

but always tending toward the peace of oblivion

(and [need it be said?] no energy/power drain).

The true conservationist does not preserve. The true conservationist is the death of everything.

6.

the death of everything wants to scrape the barnacles off the ocean liner of culture.

7.

Today we have hundreds, nay, thousands of people telling us what's up with this or that. The democratization of message transmission has led to (what can only with extreme charity be called) the democratization of expression. That's fine: it's not as if the voices are any more wacked out, it's just that there's more of them. And besides, some of the most wacked out voices are right there on the top of the "traditional media" pile.

the death of everything strives to break apart the control systems at the heart of the word. This is particularly tricky considering the fact that the operations take place at the level of word. the death of everything is far from pure in this sense, especially when "calmly and rationally" discussing politics

{assuming that this defective, bipolar political monstrosity is somehow a) functioning logically, and b) worthy of "serious" discussion is in and of itself dangerously faulty logic}

or appearing to align itself in the political spectrum.

"Political", here, meaning American politics.

For that reason, the death of everything needs to be taken as a whole. A defective whole, certainly, but hopefully with its moments of

8.

insight? No, death. The breaking apart, the entropy is the thing. Effective in and of itself, the aiming, the focus, the purpose tends to pollute it, but not fatally.

9.

And thus, the circle, the cycle, the . . . whatever. One thing's for sure, after you've looped around, you're not in the same place, even if the deja vu is heavy . . .

10.

Life and death. Death and life. You don't get one without the other. As the ocean liner of this reality trundles along,

11.

becoming more massive and burdened as it goes,

12.

it sinks ever more precipitously to the dark depths.

13.

Our reality is burdened to the point that it is becoming unworkable. It has to be picked apart, torn asunder, loosened up (nuclei split, electrons ejected from their orbits). Something has to die so that reality can live. And, more than just something, it has to be

14.

everything. Anything less than everything would betray an agenda. Everything dies so that all can be reborn.

15.

"Now I die and vanish," you would say, "and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent . . . " Zarathustra's eagle and serpent

16.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust - Remember always: from ashes you came, to ashes you shall return." Ash Wednesday Invocation

Bill Maher Needs to Shut the F@#% Up

Democracies, even ones as homogeneous as the US Government, are like oil tankers: when one speaks of turning them, one is talking in terms of miles, not feet or yards. After years of conservative control (Nixon through Bush II, with a brief respite for the Carter administration - and yes, Bill Clinton counts as a conservative, except for maybe his first two years), to expect the government to immediately cleave to Obama's agenda is completely unrealistic . . . especially when at least half of the Congressional Democrats are more conservative than the middle-of-the-road president.

Bill Maher is hitting the publicity circuit with his complaints about the president's performance 150 days into his first term. Apparently, Maher has already grown impatient with Obama, comparing him to media creation Lindsay Lohan and repeatedly stating that he needs more of a Bush (or should that be Cheney?) fuck-you attitude toward governance. Maher (through his surrogate Obama) has won his election, now he wants his pound of flesh . . . and he's pissed he's not getting it.

Maher's main complaint is that Obama is running a media presidency - essentially all talk and no legislation. On the surface, he does seem to have a point: Obama is clearly as concerned with maintaining a public profile as he is to ramrodding his agenda through Congress. To a true believer in US democracy, a postmodern media presidency is an abberation.

But the government will never be the source of true change. This much is clear to both the left and the right, and faith is hard to come by even for the political/demographic cluster in the middle. The system is geared to inertia - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

And so, here we have Maher, pissed at Obama, all because of inertia. Maher believes that Bush II is a symbol of aggressive change, and wants Obama to be his photographic negative . . . and yet, in legislative terms, Bush's rough conservative corners will be sanded down by Obama. As surely as Reagan ran up the deficit and Clinton stripped away financial regulation, the middle will be assumed again over the course of the next 4-8 years. By then, Bush will have been for naught. And, under the traditional model, any trending to the left by Obama will be counteracted not too long after that. So the status quo, and those whom it benefits.

What Maher is missing is that the media component of the Obama presidency may be the most important part: he is bypassing the legislature and going directly to the American people. Now, in and if itself, this is not a novel gambit . . . politicians routinely run for office using the media, and most recently, Illinois's pillar of moral respectability Rod Blagojevich turned to the media when he had no other avenues left. But Obama seems to be moving in a different direction: what I took to be a fog of platitudes during the campaign may be his attempt to shape the public consciousness in his own idealistic image. As president, he has maintained this relentless idealistic campaigning while filling in the details with specific policy objectives. Where he parts from tradition is that the idealism is the point, and that policy is secondary.

And, I should add, he is still running as artful a campaign as the one that won him the presidency. The most interesting aspect of his media assualt is the way he assiduously avoids the culture wars: though he clearly delineates a progressive agenda, he approaches it from a strictly logical as opposed to moral or cultural angle. To Obama, morality supersedes all, but it is a morality based in logic, and beyond culture. This move puts him beyond the culture warriors from Sarah Palin on down through Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and their media ilk. If Obama has his way, the more time passes, the less relevant the culture wars become.

And, for his part, Maher is nothing more than a Limbaugh for the left. He is jingoistic, self-promoting, and less concerned with truth than with his place in the media landscape. Maher has a lot of nerve comparing Obama to Lindsay Lohan, since he is much more a slave to the media order than Obama - at least Obama defines his role, while Maher is an opportunist who breaches like a pimple on the face of media culture. Unlike Michael Moore, who is a gadfly with an agenda, Maher is nothing more than a media whore. It is he who is Lohanesque, not Obama.

I may be projecting my ideas onto Obama inappropriately. I gotta say, though, I like this guy. It's not that I agree with him - he's much too centrist for my tastes. His support of gay marriage is far too lukewarm, his continued support of financial bailouts is troubling, his military policy is dangerously flexible, and his health care policy is a joke. Nonetheless, Obama seems to be a small crack in the facade of things the way they are. If I'm wrong, at least it's nice to have a president who's not an idiot.