Twilight Of The Machines Part 3

In its heyday in the American south, slavery never lacked for apologists. Writers, preachers, and planters chimed in to defend the peculiar inst.i.tution as divinely ordained and justified by the racial superiority of whites over blacks. The Abolitionists, who burned the Const.i.tution, hid fugitives, and attacked federal a.r.s.enals, were widely viewed as dangerous firebrands fit for prison or the gallows.

In hindsight, the word "slavery" connotes a world of oppression, violence, degradation, and resistance. The vile, deluded racism of slavery's 19th century apologists is unmistakable from our 21st century viewpoint, but how many see our century's version of slavery in a similarly revealing light?

In the name of progress, world development and empire are enslaving humankind and destroying nature, everywhere. The juggernaut known as globalization has absorbed nearly all opposition, overwhelming resistance by means of an implacable, universalizing system of capital and technology.' A sense of futility that approaches nihilism is now accepted as an inevitable response to modernity: "Whatever...." The poverty of theory is starkly illuminated in this fatalistic atmosphere. Academic bookshelves are loaded with tomes that counsel surrender and accommodation to new realities. Other enthusiasts have climbed onto the globalization bandwagon, or more commonly, were never not on board. From an abolitionist perspective, the response of most intellectuals to a growing planetary crisis consists of apologia in endless variations.

Patrick Brantlinger' suggests, for example, that in the "post-historical" age we have lost the ability to explain social change. But the reasons behind global change become evident to those who are willing to examine fundamental a.s.sumptions. The debasing of life in all spheres, now proceeding at a quickening pace, stems from the dynamics of civilization itself. Domestication of animals and plants, a process only io,ooo years old, has penetrated every square inch of the planet. The result is the elimination of individual and community autonomy and health, as well as the rampant, accelerating destruction of the natural world. Morris Berman, Jerry Mander, and other critics have described the "disenchantment" of a world subordinated to technological development. Civilization subst.i.tutes mediation for direct experience, distancing people from their natural surroundings and from each other. Ever greater anomie, dispersal, and loneliness pervade our lives. A parallel instrumentalism is at work in our ecosystems, transforming them into resources to be mined, and imperiling the entire biosphere.3 At base, globalization is nothing new. Division of labor, urbanization, conquest, dispossession, and diasporas have been part and parcel of the human condition since the beginning of civilization. Yet globalization takes the domesticating process to new levels. World capital now aims to exploit all available life; this is a defining and original trait of globalization. Early zoth century observers (Tunnies and Durkheim among them) noted the instability and fragmentation that necessarily accompanied modernization. These are only more evident in this current, quite possibly terminal stage. The project of integration through world control causes disintegration everywhere: more rootlessness, withdrawal, pointlessness... none of which have arrived overnight. The world system has become a high-tech imperialism. The new frontier is cybers.p.a.ce. In the language of perennial empire, global powers issue their crusading, adventurous call to tame and colonize (or recolonize).4 Marshall McLuhan's "global village" concept is back in vogue, albeit with a clonal tinge to it, as everyone is designated to be part of a single global society. One interdependent McWorld, kept alive by the standardized sadness of a draining consumerism. It should be no surprise that among those who speak in the name of "anti-globalization" there are actually a growing number who in fact oppose it, whose perspective is that of de-globalization.

The "global village," subject to almost instantly worldwide epidemics' , has become a downright scary place. Since the 198os the term "risk" has become pervasive in almost every discursive field or discipline in developed societies. The power of nation-states to "manage" risks has demonstrably declined, and individual anxiety has increased, with the spread of modernization and globalization.6 This trajectory also brings growing disillusionment with representative government and a rising, if still largely inchoate anti-modern orientation. These outlooks have strongly informed anti-authoritarian movements in recent years. There is a perceived hollowness, if not malevolence, to basic social inst.i.tutions across the board. As Manuel Castells puts it, "we can perceive around the world an extraordinary feeling of uneasiness with the current process of technology-led change that threatens to generate a widespread backlash."7 A technified world continues to proliferate, offering the promise of escape from the less and less attractive context of our lives. Hoping noone realizes that technology is centrally responsible for impoverished reality, its hucksters spread countless enticements and promises, while it continues to metastasize. Net/Web culture (a revealing nomenclature) is a prime example, extending its deprived version of social existence via virtual s.p.a.ce. Now that embedded, face-to-face connectivity is being so resolutely annihilated, it's time for virtual community.

According to Rob s.h.i.+elds' chilling formulation, "the presence of absence is virtual."8 "Community" is unlike any other in human memory; no real people are present and no real communication takes place. In convenient, disembodied virtual community, one shuts people off at the click of a mouse to "go" elsewhere. Pseudo-community moves forward on the ruins of what is left of actual connections. Senses and sensuality diminish apace;9 "responsibility" is interred in the expanding postmodern Lost Words Museum. Shriveled opposition and fatalistic, resigned s.h.i.+rkers forget that anti-slavery abolitionists, once a tiny minority, refused to quit and eventually prevailed.

Certainly none of this has happened overnight. The AT&T telephone commercial/exhortation of some years back, "Reach out and touch someone," offered human contact but concealed the truth that such technology has in fact been crucial in taking us ever further from that contact. Direct experience is replaced by mediation and simulation. Digitized information supplants the basis of actual closeness and possible trust among interacting physical beings. According to Boris Groys, "We just have to deal with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes, our ears. Everyone who has worked with a computer knows that."'

Globalization is likewise scarcely new on the economic and political scene. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels predicted the emergence of a world market, based on growing production and consumption patterns of their day. The Spanish empire, 300 years earlier, was the first global power network.

Marx contended that every technology releases opposing possibilities of emanc.i.p.ation and domination. But somehow the project of a humanized technology has proven groundless and result-free; only technified humanity has come to pa.s.s. Technology is the embodiment of the social order it accompanies, and in its planetary advance transfers the fundamental ethos and values behind that technology. It never exists in a vacuum and is never value-neutral. Some alleged critics of technology speak, for example, of advancing "to a higher level of integration between humanity and nature."" This "integration" cannot avoid echoing the integration that is basic to civilization and its globalization; namely, the cornerstone inst.i.tutions that integrate all into themselves. Foremost among them is division of labor.

A state of growing pa.s.sivity in everyday life is one of the most basic developments. Increasingly dependent-even infantilized-by a technological life-world, and under the ever-more complete effective control of specialized expertise, the fractionated subject is vitiated by division of labor. That most fundamental inst.i.tution, which defines complexity and has driven domination forward ab origino. Source of all alienation, "the subdivision of labour is the a.s.sa.s.sination of a people."" Adam Smith in the 18th century has perhaps never been excelled in his eloquent portrait of its mutilating, deforming, immiserating nature. "

It was the prerequisite for domestication '14 and continues to be the motor of the Megamachine, to use Lewis Mumford's term. Division of labor underlies the paradigmatic nature of modernity (technology) and its disastrous outcome.

Although the wind is s.h.i.+fting in some quarters, it's somewhat baffling that theory has seldom put into question this inst.i.tution (or domestication, for that matter). The latent desire for wholeness, simplicity, and the immediate or direct has been overwhelmingly dismissed as futile and/or irrelevant. "The task we now face is not to reject or turn away from complexity but to learn to live with it creatively," advises Mark Taylor." We must "resist any simple nostalgia," counsels Katherine Hayles, while granting that "nightmare" may well describe what's been showing up lately."

In fact, even more confounding than lack of interest in the roots and motive force undergirding the present desolation is the fairly widespread embrace of the prospect of more of the same. How is it possible to imagine good outcomes from what is clearly generating the opposite, in every sphere of life? Instead of a hideously cyborgian program delivering emptiness and dehumanization on a huge scale, Hayles, for instance, finds in the posthuman an "exhilarating prospect" of "opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means," while high-tech "systems evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability." ''

What's happening is that a "what we have lost" sensibility is being overwhelmed by a "what have we got to lose/try anything" orientation. This s.h.i.+ft testifies profoundly to the depth of loss and defeat that civilization/patriarchy/industrialism/modernity has engineered. The magnitude of the surrender of these intellectuals has nullified their capacity for a.n.a.lysis or vision. For example, "Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here.'"'

Technology as an injunction to forget, as a solvent of meaning," finds its cultural voice in postmodernism. Articulated in the context of transnationalism whereby globalization renders its totalizing nature glaringly evident, postmodernism pursues its refusal of "any notion of representable or essential totality."' Helplessness reigns; there are no foundational places left from which to think about or resist the juggernaut. As Scott Lash states, "We can no longer step outside of the global communications flows to find a solid fulcrum for critique."" His misnamed Critique of Information announces total abdication: "My argument in this book is that such critique is no longer possible. The global information order itself has, it seems to me, erased and swallowed up the possibility of a s.p.a.ce of critical reflection.""

With no ground from which to make judgments, the very viability of criteria dissolves; the postmodern thus becomes prey to every manner of preposterous and abject p.r.o.nouncement. I. Bluhdorn, for example, simply waves the little matter of environmental catastrophe away: "To the extent that we manage to get used to (naturalize) the non-availability of universally valid normative standards, the ecological problem... simply dissolves."" The cynical acceptance of every continuing horror, clothed in aesthetized irony and implicit apathy.

Downright bizarre is the incoherent celebration of the marriage of the postmodern and the technological, summed up in a t.i.tle: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium.14 According to authors Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, "The postmodern adventure is just beginning and alternative futures unfold all around us." To speak of defending the particular against universalizing tendencies is a postmodern commonplace, but this is mocked by the eager acceptance of the most universalizing force of all, the h.o.m.ogenization machine which is technology.

Andrew Feenberg discusses the all-pervasive presence of technology, arguing that when the Left joins in the celebration of technological advances, the ensuing consensus leaves little to disagree about. A leftist himself, Feenberg concludes that "we cannot recover what reification has lost by regressing to pretechnological conditions, to some prior unity irrelevant to the contemporary world."" But such "relevance" is what is really at issue. To remain committed to the "contemporary world" is precisely the foundationless foundation of complicity. Postmodernity as the realization or completion of universal technology, globalization's underlying predicate.

When the basics are ruled off-limits to contestation, the resulting evasion can have no liberatory consequence. Infatuation with surface, the marginal, the partial, etc. is typical. Postmodernism billed itself as subversive and destabilizing, but delivered only aesthetically. Emblematic of a period of defeat, the image consumes the event and we consume the images. The tone throughout Derrida's work, for instance, seems never far from mourning. The abiding sadness of Blanchot is also to the point. The postmodern, according to Geoffery Hartman, "suggests a disenchantment that is final, or self-perpetuating.""

The subject, in the current ethos, is seen on the one hand as an unstable, fragmented collection of positions in discourse-even as a mere effect of power, or of language-and on the other hand as part of a positive, pluralist array of alternatives. By avoiding examination of the main lines of domination, however, postmodernists blind themselves to the actual, deforming characteristics of technology and consumerism. The forgetful self of technology, buffeted by the ever-s.h.i.+fting currents of commodified culture, is hard-pressed to form an enduring ident.i.ty. There is, in fact, an increasing distance between dominant global forces and the endangered coherent individual.

The high-tech network of the world system is completing the transformation of cla.s.ses into ma.s.ses, the erosion of group solidarity and autonomy, and the isolation of the self. As Bamyeh points out, these are the preconditions of modern ma.s.s democracies, as well as the basic political features of global modernity itself.' Meanwhile, partic.i.p.ation in this setup dwindles, as a ma.s.sified, standardized techno-world makes a joke of the idea that any of it could be changed on its own terms. Elections, for instance, are widely understood to be insulting and meaningless rituals, technicized and commodified exercises in manipulation." Fulfillment and freedom are fast evaporating, while the predominant note of social theory seems to be completely uncritical. The subject is merely a s.h.i.+fting intersection of global networks; "the I is a moment of complexity," says Mark Taylor in unconcerned summary. z9 Along with health-threatening obesity (largely due to the rapid spread of "fast food" and other processed foods), depression has become an international scourge. Among various consequences of development, depression testifies directly to the loss of deeply important ingredients of human happiness. But as Lyotard has it, "despair is taken as a disorder to control, never as the sign of an irremediable lack."3 Already the fourth leading cause of disability in the U.S., depression is projected to take second place by 2020. Despite the general reactionary focus on genetics and chemical palliatives, depression has much more to do with the growing isolation of individuals within developed society. The figures about declining social and civic members.h.i.+p or affiliation are relevant; the rise of autism, binge drinking, and illiteracy betoken depression's progres- sas an even more profound phenomenon. "At the time of the so-called triumph of the West, why do so many people feel so c.r.a.ppy, so lonely, so abandoned?" asks philosopher Bruce Wils.h.i.+re."

It should no longer appear paradoxical that a deepening malaise co-exists with the escalating importance of expertise in managing everyday life. People distrust the inst.i.tutions, and have lost confidence in themselves. Elissa Gootman's "Job Description: Life of the Party" discusses hired party "motivators," professionals who guarantee successful socializing." On a more serious note, instrumental rationality penetrates our lives at ever-younger ages. Kids as young as two are now routinely medicated for depression and insomnia."

An array of postmodernisms and fundamentalisms seems to have displaced belief in the future. Marcuse wondered whether narcissism's yearning for completeness and perfection might not contain the germ of a different reality principle. Even whether, contra Hegel, reconciliation could only happen outside of historical time.34 Such "critics" as there be (Chomsky, Derrida, Ricoeur, Plumwood, for example) call for a global governance/planning apparatus-under which, it must be said, the individual would have even less of a voice. Anti-totality Derridawants a "New international," apparently ignorant of the actual zero degree of "democracy" that obtains in the current political jurisdictions. Such superficiality, avoidance, and illusion surely const.i.tutes acceptance of the ongoing devastation. Of course, if statist regulation could be an answer it would necessarily be totalitarian. And it would be partial at best, because it would never indict any of civilization's motive forces, such as division of labor or domestication.

What is clear to some of us is that a turn away from the virtual, global networks of power, unlimited media, and all the rest is a neces- sity.Abreakwith this worsening world toward embeddedness, the faceto-face, non-domination of nature and each other.

Todd Gitlin, while rejecting such a refusal as mere "wishfulness," is helpful on the subject: "So consistent abolitionists have little choice but to be root-and-branch, scorch-and-burn primitivists, scornful of the rewards of a consumer society, committed to cutting the links in the invisible chain connecting modern production, consumption, and the technologies implicated in both. Only unabashed primitivists can create postindustrial wholeness ."14 Overman and Unab.u.mber.

Born a hundred years apart, the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodore Kaczynski contain some important parallels. Both refused extremely promising academic careers: Nietzsche in philology, Kaczynski in mathematics. Each tried to make the most of a basically solitary existence. "Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains," said Nietzsche in Ecce h.o.m.o. For Kaczynski, the ice and high mountains were a more literal description, given his years in a cabin in the Montana Rockies.

Leslie Chamberlain (Nietzsche in Turin, London, 1996) summed up Nietzsche's experience as "G.o.dless, jobless, wifeless and homeless." Kaczynski wandered less, but the characterization fits him very closely, too. Both were failures in relating to women, and uninterested in considering the condition of women in society. The two were both menaced at times by illness and impoverishment. Each was betrayed by his only sibling: Nietzsche by his sister Elizabeth, who tampered with his writings when he was helpless to prevent her; Kaczynski by his brother David, who fingered him for the FBI.

Nietzsche's central concept was the will to power. Kaczynski's big idea was the power process.

Both extolled strength and attacked pity: Nietzsche with his critique of Christianity as an unhealthy "slave morality," Kaczynski in terms of leftism as a dishonest projection of personal weakness.

Each developed, at base, a moral psychology, although Kaczynski is not limited to a psychology.

Nietzsche's a.n.a.lysis is contained within culture. His quest for a regeneration of the human spirit and the fulfillment of the individual is essentially aesthetic. Art, in many ways, replaced G.o.d for him. His postChristian artistic vision is the measure of the Dionysian "revaluation of values." "What matters most... is always culture" (Twilight of the G.o.ds).

There is no getting around Nietzsche's belief in hierarchy, his justification of rank and exploitation. Kaczynski's anarchist vision called for free community, decentralized to the point of face-to-face interaction.

Kaczynski, like Nietzsche, also desires virility over decadence, but saw that this can only be realized in terms of a social transformation. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche blamed "the democratization of Europe" for what he saw as a herd mentality. In Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski recognized that a much deeper change than the political (not to mention the aesthetic) would be needed for the individual to be fre and fulfilled. He understood the logic of industrialized life to be the obstacle, and called for its destruction. For him, how everyday life is experienced was a far more important factor than abstract values or aesthetic expression. Nietzsche and Kaczynski thus see the values crisis quite differently. Especially in the persona of Zarathustra, Nietzsche calls for personal redemption through an act of the will. Kaczynski does not overlook the context of the individual, the forces that frustrate his/her life at a basic level.

Nietzsche focused on German culture, e.g. the case of Wagner. Kaczynski examined the movement and consequences of an increasingly artificial and estranging global industrial order.

Nietzsche affirmed the free spirit in books such as Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, only to question the existence of free will in other texts. Kaczynski showed that individual autonomy is problematic in modern society, and that this problem is a function of that society.

Both Nietzsche and Kaczynski are seen as nihilists by many. The prevailing postmodern ethos elevates Nietzsche and ignores Kaczynski-largely because Nietzsche does not challenge society and Kaczynski does.

For postmodernism, the self is just a product, an outcome, nothing more than a surface effect. Nietzsche actually originated this stance (now also known as "the death of the subject"), which can be found in many of his writings. Kaczynski expressed a determinate autonomy and showed that the individual has not been extinguished. One can lament the end of the sovereign individual and lapse into postmodern pa.s.sivity and cynicism, or diagnose the individual's condition in society and challenge this condition, as Kaczynski did.

Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated in the 192OS as Civilization and Its Discontents, reads more literally as "what makes us uncomfortable about culture." Nietzsche never questioned culture itself. Kaczynski shed light on why industrialism, the ground of culture, must be overcome for health and freedom to exist.

Why Primitivism?

Debord biographer Anselm Giap' referred to the puzzle of the present, "where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself," recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood Krutch: "What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human that the 'control of nature' was to provide? "'

The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed ba.n.a.l, if it weren't so horrifying. Increasing rates of species extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world's oceans, ozone holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning of air, water, and soil, to name a few realities.

A grisly link to the social world is widespread pharmaceutical contamination of watersheds.' In this case, destruction of the natural world is driven by ma.s.sive alienation, masked by drugs. In the U.S., life-threatening obesity is sharply rising, and tens of millions suffer from serious depression and/or anxiety.4 There are frequent eruptions of multiple homicides in homes, schools, and workplaces, while the suicide rate among young people has tripled in recent decades.5 Fibromy- algia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other "mystery" /psychosomatic illnesses have multiplied, vying with the emergence of new diseases with known physiological origins: Ebola, La.s.sa fever, AIDS, Legionnaires' disease. The illusion of technological mastery is mocked by the antibiotic-resistant return of TB and malaria, not to mention outbreaks of E coli, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, etc. Even a cursory survey of contemporary psychic immiseration would require many pages. Barely suppressed anger, a sense of emptiness, corrosion of belief in inst.i.tutions across the board, high stress levels, all contribute to what Kornoouh has called "the growing fracture of the social bond."6 Today's reality keeps underlining the inadequacy of current theory and its overall retreat from any redemptive project. It seems undeniable that's what's left of life on earth is being taken from us. Where is the depth of a.n.a.lysis and vision to match the extremity of the human condition and the fragility of our planet's future? Are we simply only with a totalizing current of degradation and loss?

The crisis is diffuse, but at the same time it is starkly visible on every level. One comes to agree with Ulrich Beck that "people have begun to question modernity.. its premises have begun to wobble. Many people are deeply upset over the house-of-cards character of superindustrialism."7 Agnes h.e.l.ler observed that our condition becomes less stable and more chaos-p.r.o.ne the further we move away from nature, contrary to the dominant ideology of progress and development.$ With disenchantment comes a growing sense that something different is urgently needed.

For a new orientation the challenge is at a depth that theorists have almost entirely avoided. To go beyond the prospectless malaise, the collapse of social confidence so devastatingly expressed in Les Particules Elementaires (Michel Houlebecq's end-of-the-millennium novel),' the a.n.a.lytical perspective simply must s.h.i.+ft in a basic way. This consists, for openers, in refusing Foucault's conclusion that human capacities and relations are inescapably technologized '

As Eric Vogelin put it, "The death of the spirit is the price of progress."" But if the progress of nihilism is identical to the nihilism of progress, whence comes the rupture, the caesura? How to pose a radical break from the totality of progress, technology, modernity?

A quick scan of recent academic fads shows precisely where such a perspective has not been found. Frederic Jameson's apt formulation introduces the subject for us: "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.""

Postmodernism is the mirror of an ethos of defeat and reaction, a failure of will and intellect that has accommodated to new extremities of estrangement and destructiveness.." For the postmodernists, almost nothing can be opposed. Reality, after all, is so messy, s.h.i.+fting, complex, indeterminate; and oppositions are, of course, just so many false bina- risms. Vacuous jargon and endless side-stepping transcend pa.s.se dualisms. Daniel White, for example, prescribed "a postmodern-ecological rubric that steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed... "14 In the consumerist realm of freedom, "this complex node, where technologies are diffused, where technologies are chosen," according to Mike Michael '15 who can say if anything is at all amiss? lain Chambers is an eloquent voice of postmodern abjectness, wondering whether alienation is not simply an eternal given: "What if alienation is a terrestrial constraint destined to frustrate the 'progress' introjected in all teleologies?... Perhaps there is no separate, autonomous alternative to the capitalist structuring of the present-day world. Modernity, the westernization of the world, globalization, are the labels of an economic, political and cultural order that is seemingly installed for the foreseeable future."'6 The fixation on surface (depth is an illusion; so are presence and immediacy), the ban on unifying narratives and inquiry into origins, indifference to method and evidence, emphasis on effects and novelty, all find their expression in postmodern culture at large. These att.i.tudes and practices spread everywhere, along with the technology it embraces without reservation. At the same time, though, there are signs that these trivializing and derivative recipes for "thought" may be losing their appeal.'' An antidote to postmodern surrender has been made available, largely through what is known as the anti-globalization movement.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, who once thought that technologized existence offered options, has begun to write about the sinister development of a neo-totalitarian, instrumentalist imprisonment. In earlier essays he pointed to a loss of affect as part of the postmodern condition. More recently he has attributed that loss to techno-scientific hegemony. Crippled individuals are only part of the picture, as Lyotard portrays social effects of what can only be called instrumental reason, in pathological ascendance. And contra Habermas, this domination by instrumental reason is in no way challenged by "communicative action."" Referring to global urban development, Lyotard stated, "We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable. Otherwise, we are just lodged there." Also, "with the megalopolis, what is called the West realizes and diffuses its nihilism. It is called development."'9 In other words, there may be a way out of the postmodern cul-desac, at least for some. Those still contained by the Left have a much different legacy of failure to jettison-one that obviously transcends the "merely" cultural. Discredited and dying as an actual alternative, this perspective surely also needs to go.

Hardt and Negri's Empire' will serve as a cla.s.sic artifact of leftism, a compendium of the worn-out and left-over. These self-described communist militants have no notion whatsoever of the enveloping crisis. Thus they continue to seek "alternatives within modernity." They locate the force behind their communist revolution in "the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies."" The leftist a.n.a.lysis valiantly upholds the heart of productionist marxism, in the face of ever-advancing, standardizing, destructive technique. Small wonder Hardt and Negri fail to consider the pulverization of indigenous cultures and the natural world, or the steady worldwide movement toward complete dehumanization.

Claude Kornoouh considers monstrous "the idea that progress consists in the total control of the genetic stock of all living beings." For him, this would amount to an unfreedom "that even the bloodiest totalitarianism of the zoth century was not able to accomplish."" Hardt and Negri would not shrink from such control, since they do not question any of its premises, dynamics, or preconditions.

It is no small irony that the militants of Empire stand exposed for the incomprehension of the trajectory of modernity by one of their opposite number, Oswald Spengler. As nationalist and reactionary that Spengler was, The Decline of the West is the great masterwork of world history, and his grasp of Western civilization's inner logic is uncanny in its prescience.

Especially relevant here are Spengler's judgments, so many decades ago, concerning technological development and its social, cultural, and environmental impacts. He saw that the dynamic, promethean ("Faustian") nature of global civilization becomes fully realized as selfdestructive ma.s.s society and equally calamitous modern technology. The subjugation of nature leads ineluctably to its destruction, and to the destruction of civilization. "An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do everything in mechanical terms."" Civilized man is a "petty creator against Nature." "... This revolutionary in the world of life... has become the slave of his creature. The Culture, the aggregate of artificial, personal, self-made life-forms, develops into a close-barred cage. ..."~4 Whereas Marx viewed industrial civilization as both reason incarnate and a permanent achievement, Spengler saw it as ultimately incompatible with its physical environment, and therefore suicidally transitory. "Higher Man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with blood, deformed and mutilated it."" Spengler understood that "the history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close."~6 Theodor Adorno seemed to concur with elements of Spengler's thinking: "What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline ."17 Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment 8 has a critique of civilization at its core, with its focal image of Odysseus forcibly repressing the Sirens' song of eros. Dialectic's central thesis is that "the history of civilization is... the history of renunciation."" As Albrecht Wellmer summed it up, "Dialectic of Enlightenment is the theory of an irredeemably darkened modernity."10 This perspective, now continually augmented by confirming data, tends to render irrelevant both sources of theory and the logic of progress. If there is no escape from a condition we can understand all too well, what more is there to say?

Herbert Marcuse tried to lay out an escape route in Eros and Civilization," by attempting to uncouple civilization from modernity. To preserve the "gains" of modernity, the solution is a "non-repressive" civilization. Marcuse would dispense with "surplus repression," implying that repression itself is indispensable. Since modernity depends on production, itself a repressive inst.i.tution, redefining work as free play can salvage both modernity and civilization. I find this an implausible, even desperate defense of civilization. Marcuse fails to refute Freud's view that civilization cannot be reformed.

Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents that non-repressive civilization is impossible, because the foundation of civilization is a forcible ban on instinctual freedom and eros. To introduce work and culture, the ban must be permanently imposed. Since this repression and its constant maintenance are essential to civilization, universal civilization brings universal neurosis." Durkheim had already noted that as humankind "advances" with civilization and the division of labor, "the general happiness of society is decreasing."33 As a good bourgeois, Freud justified civilization on the grounds that work and culture are necessary and that civilization enables humans to survive on a hostile planet. "The princ.i.p.al task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature." And further, "But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all to strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear."34 Possibly civilization's most fundamental ideological underpinning is Hobbes' characterization of the pre-civilized state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short." Freud subscribed to this view, of course, as did Adorno and Horkheimer.

Since the mid-196os there has been a paradigm s.h.i.+ft in how anthropologists understand prehistory, with profound implications for theory. Based on a solid body of archaeological and ethnographic research, mainstream anthropology has abandoned the Hobbesian hypothesis. Life before or outside civilization is now defined more specifically as social existence prior to domestication of animals and plants. Mounting evidence demonstrates that before the Neolithic s.h.i.+ft from a foraging or gatherer-hunter mode of existence to an agricultural lifeway, most people had ample free time, considerable gender autonomy or equality, an ethos of egalitarianism and sharing, and no organized violence.

A (misleadingly-named) "Man the Hunter" conference at the University of Chicago in 1966 launched the reversal of the Hobbesian view, which for centuries had provided ready justification for all the repressive inst.i.tutions of a complex, imperializing Western culture. Supporting evidence for the new paradigm has come forth from archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Adrienne Zihlman, and many others; these studies are widely available, and now form the theoretical basis for everything from undergraduate courses to field research.

Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of how our Paleolithic forbears led mainly peaceful, egalitarian, and healthy lives for about two million years. The use of fire to cook tuberous vegetables as early as 1.9 million years ago, and long distance sea travel 8oo,ooo years ago, are two findings among many that testify to an intelligence equal to our own.36 Genetic engineering and imminent human cloning are just the most current manifestations of a dynamic of control and domination of nature that humans set in motion 1o,ooo years ago, when our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and colonized at the deepest levels, paralleling the controls that have been ever more thoroughly engineered at the social level. Now we can see this trajectory for what it really is: a transformation that inevitably brought all-enveloping destruction, that was in no way necessary. Significantly, the worldwide archaeological record demonstrates that many human groups tried agriculture and/or pastoralism and later gave them up, falling back on more reliable foraging and hunting strategies. Others refused for generations to adopt the domestication practices of close neighbors.

It is here that a primitivist alternative has begun to emerge, in theory and in practice.37 To the question of technology must be added that of civilization itself. Ever-growing doc.u.mentation of human prehistory as avery long period of largely non-alienated human life stands in stark contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity.

In the context of his discussion of the limitations of Habermas, Joel Whitebook wrote, "It may be that the scope of and depth of the social and ecological crisis are so great that nothing short of an epochal transformation of world views will be commensurate with them."" Since that time, Castoriadis concluded that a radical transformation will "have to launch an attack on the division of labor in its. .h.i.therto known forms."39 Division of labor, slowly emerging through prehistory, was the foundation of domestication and continues to drive the technological imperative forward.

The challenge is to disprove George Grant's thesis that we live in "a world where only catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the potentialities of technique,"4 and to actualize Claude Kornoouh's judgment that revolution can only be redefined against progress.41 Second-Best Life:.

Real Virtuality.

Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relations.h.i.+ps. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial ma.s.s society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized.

In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of'vir- tual" was as the adjectival form of "virtue". Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of ident.i.ty and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect intimacy of human and machine, the eradication of difference between in-person and computer-based interaction.

Second Life. Born Again. Both are escape routes from a gravely worsening reality. Both the high-tech and the fundamentalist options are pa.s.sive responses to the actual situation now engulfing us. We are so physically and socially distant from one another, and encroaching virtuality drives us ever further apart. We can choose to "live" as freefloating surrogates in the new, untrashed Denial Land of VR, but only if we embrace what Zizek called "the ruthless technological drive which determines our lives."'

Cybers.p.a.ce means collapsing nature into technology, in the words of Allucquere Rosanne Stone; she notes that we are losing our grounding as physical beings.' The key response in the and techno-world is, of course, more technology. Drug technology, for the 70 million Americans with insomnia; for the s.e.xually dysfunctional males now dependent on v.i.a.g.r.a, Cialis, etc.; for the depressed and anxious who no longer dream or feel.

And as this regime works to further flatten and suppress direct experience, Virtual Reality, its latest triumph, comes in to fill the void. Second Life, There, and whatever brand is next offer dream worlds, to a world denuded of dreams. In our time, "virtual bereavement" and "online grieving" are touted as superior to being present to comfort those who mourn;' where tiny infants are subjected to videos; where "teled.i.l.d.onics" delivers simulated s.e.x to distant subjects.

"Welcome to Second Life. We look forward to seeing you in-world", the website promo beckons. Immersive and interactive, VR provides the s.p.a.ce so unlike the reality its customers reject. For a few dollars, anyone can exist there as an "avatar" who will never grow old, bored, or overweight. Wade Roush of Technology Review declares Second Life a success insofar as it is "less lonely and less predictable" than the life we have now.4 This inversion of reality is the consolation of the supernatural of many religions, and serves a similar subst.i.tutive function.

Reality is disappearing behind a screen, as the separation of mind from body and nature intensifies. The technical means are being perfected fairly quickly, making good on the promises of the early i99os. At that time VR, despite much ballyhoo,' could not really deliver the goods. Fifteen or so years later, the technology of Second Life (for example) engages many users with a strong sense of physical presence and other pseudo-sensory effects. Virtual reality is now the definitive expression of the postmodern condition, perhaps best typified by the fact that nothing wild exists there, only what serves human consumption.

Foucault described the s.h.i.+ft of power in modernity from sovereignty to discipline, and an enormously technologized daily life has accelerated this s.h.i.+ft.' Contemporary life is thoroughly surveilled and policed, to an unprecedented degree. But the weight and density of tech mediation create an even more defining reality, and a more profound stage of control. When the nature of experience, on a primary level, is so deeply altered, we are seeing a fundamental s.h.i.+ft-a s.h.i.+ft being extended everywhere, at an accelerating pace.

Virtual reality best typifies this movement, its simulations and robotic fantasies a cutting-edge component of the steadily advancing, universalizing, standardizing global culture. Sadly pertinent is Philip Zai's judgement that VR is the "metaphysical maturity of civilization" 7 All that is tangible, sensual, and earth-based corrodes and shrinks within technologically mediated existence.

Of course, there are forms of resistance to this latest efflorescence of the false. But a luddite reaction always seems to pale before the magnitude of what it faces. There is a very long, sedimented history behind every newest technological move, an unbroken chain of contingency. The leap involved in grasping new technics is made easier by the gradual impoverishment of human desires and apt.i.tudes caused by the earlier innovations. The promise is, always, that more technology will bring improvement-which more accurately means, more technology will make up for what was lost in the preceding "advances". The only way out is to break this chain, by refusing its imperative.

Heidegger a.s.sailed the "objectification of all beings... brought into the disposal of representation and production," pointing out that "nature appears everywhere as the object of technology", and concluding that "World becomes object".' He also understood how technology changes our relation to things, a phenomenon underlined by virtual reality. "Talk of a respect for things is more and more unintelligible in a world that is becoming ever more technical. They are simply vanis.h.i.+ng... ,: remarked Gadamer.9 Virtuality is certainly that "vanis.h.i.+ng".

There has been in fact a recent counter-attack in favor of respecting things as such, in favor of freeing them from an instrumental status, at least on the philosophical plane. t.i.tles such as Things (2004) and The Lure of the Object (2005) speak to this.' Desire for the authentic experience of "thingness" (Heidegger's term) is a rebuke to the pathological condition known as modernity, a realization that "accepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting otherness as such.""

Immersion in virtual reality is a particularly virulent strain of this pathology because of the degree of interactivity and self-representation involved. Never has the built environment depended so crucially on our partic.i.p.ation, and never before has this partic.i.p.ation been so potentially totalizing. With its appeal as, literally, a second life, a second world, it is The Matrix-one that we ourselves are to continually pay to reproduce. Heinz Pagels' description of the symbolic, in general, certainly applies to virtual reality: in denying "the immediacy of reality and in creating a subst.i.tute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion."" This use of cybers.p.a.ce takes representation to new levels of self-enclosure and self-domestication.

Spengler's survey of Western civilization led him to conclude that "an artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fas.h.i.+on."" Second Life, Google Earth, etc., with their graphics cards and broadband connections are sophisticated and enticing escape hatches, but it's still the same basic machine orientation. And VR, as David Gelernter happily proclaimed, "is the sort of instrument that modern life demands."4 Born of military research and the entertainment industry, Virtual Reality depends on us for its projected role throughout society. Real virtuality will be the norm when it infects various spheres, but only with our active consent. Wittgenstein felt that "it is not absurd e.g. to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity"15 Science and technology are the greatest triumphs of civilization, and the point is more grimly apparent than ever.

Breaking Point?

The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living, the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its logic.

The only stable continuity has been that of the body, and that has become vulnerable in unprecedented ways. We now inhabit a culture, according to Furedi', of high anxiety that borders on a state of outright panic. Postmodern discourse suppresses articulations of suffering, a facet of its accommodation to the inevitability of further, systematic desolation. The prominence of chronic degenerative diseases makes a chilling parallel with the permanent erosion of all that is healthy and life-affirming inside industrial culture. That is, maybe the disease can be slowed a bit in its progression, but no overall cure is imaginable in this context-which created the condition in the first place.

As much as we yearn for community, it is all but dead. McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears tell us that 19 years ago, the typical American had three close friends; now the number is two. Their national study also reveals that over this period of time, the number of people without one friend or confidant has tripled.' Census figures show a correspondingly sharp rise in single-person households, as the technoculture-with its vaunted "connectivity"-grows steadily more isolating, lonely and empty.

In j.a.pan "people simply aren't having s.e.x" and the suicide rate has been rising rapidly.' Hikikimori, or self-isolation, finds over a million young people staying in their rooms for years. Where the technoculture is most developed, levels of stress, depression and anxiety are highest.

Questions and ideas can only become currents in the world insofar as reality, external and internal, makes that possible. Our present state, devolving toward catastrophe, displays a reality in unmistakable terms. We are bound for a head-on collision between urgent new questions and a totality-global civilization-that can provide no answers. A world that offers no future, but shows no signs of admitting this fact, imperils its own future along with the life, health, and freedom of all beings on the planet. Civilization's rulers have always squandered whatever remote chances they had to prepare for the end of life as they know it, by choosing to ride the crest of domination, in all its forms.

It has become clear to some that the depth of the expanding crisis, which is as ma.s.sively dehumanizing as it is ecocidal, stems from the cardinal inst.i.tutions of civilization itself. The discredited promises of Enlightenment and modernity represent the pinnacle of the grave mistake known as civilization. There is no prospect that this Order will renounce that which has defined and maintained it, and apparently little likelihood that its various ideological supporters can face the facts. If civilization's collapse has already begun, a process now unofficially but widely a.s.sumed, there may be grounds for a widespread refusal or abandonment of the reigning totality. Indeed, its rigidity and denial may be setting the stage for a cultural s.h.i.+ft on an unprecedented scale, which could unfold rapidly.

Of course, a paradigm s.h.i.+ft away from this entrenched, but vulnerable and fatally flawed system is far from unavoidable. The other main possibility is that too many people, for the usual reasons (fear, inertia, manufactured incapacity, etc.) will pa.s.sively accept reality as it is, until it's too late to do anything but try to deal with collapse. It's noteworthy that a growing awareness that things are going wrong, however inchoate and individualized, is fuelled by a deep, visceral unease and in many cases, acute suffering. This is where opportunity resides. From this new perspective that is certainly growing, we find the work of confronting what faces us as a species, and removing the barriers to planetary survival. The time has come for a wholesale indictment of civilization and ma.s.s society. It is at least possible that, in various modes, such a judgment can undo the death-machine before destruction and domestication inundate everything.

Although what's gone before helps us understand our current plight, we now live in obvious subjection, on a plainly greater scale than heretofore. The enveloping techno-world that is spreading so rapidly suggests movement toward even deeper control of every aspect of our lives. Adorno's a.s.sessment in the i96os is proving valid today: "Eventually the system will reach a point-the word that provides the social cue is 'integration'-where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society. Only that society itself remains the cause."4 A totality that absorbs every "alternative" and seems irreversible. Totalitarian. It is its own justification and ideology. Our refusal, our call to dismantle all this, is met with fewer and fewer countervailing protests or arguments. The bottom-line response is more along the lines of "Yes, your vision is good, true, valid; but this reality will never go away."

None of the supposed victories over inhumanity have made the world safer, not even just for our own species. All the revolutions have only tightened the hold of domination, by updating it. Despite the rise and fall of various political persuasions, it is always production that has won; technological systems never retreat, they only advance. We have been free or autonomous insofar as the Machine requires for its functioning.

Meanwhile, the usual idiotic judgments continue. "We should be free to use specific technologies as tools without adopting technology as lifestyle."5 "The worlds created through digital technology are real to the extent that we choose to play their games."6 Along with the chokehold of power, and some lingering illusions about how modernity works, the Machine is faced with worsening prospects. It is a striking fact that those who manage the dominant organization of life no longer even attempt answers or positive projections. The most pressing "issues" (e.g. Global Warming) are simply ignored, and propaganda about Community (the market plus isolation), Freedom (total surveillance society), the American Dream (!) is so false that it cannot be expected to be taken seriously.

As Sahlins pointed out, the more complex societies become, the less they are able to cope with challenges. The central concern of any state is to preserve predictability; as this capacity visibly fails, so do that state's chances of survival. When the promise of securitywanes, so does the last real support. Many studies have concluded that various ecosystems are more likely to suffer sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than undergo steady, predictable degradation. The mechanisms of rule just might be subject to a parallel development.

In earlier times there was room to maneuver. Civilization's forward movement was accompanied by a safety valve: the frontier. Large-scale expansion of the Holy Roman Empire eastward during the 12th-14th centuries, the invasion of the New World after 1500, the Westward movement in North America through the end of the 19th century. But the system becomes indebted to structures acc.u.mulated during these movements. We are hostages, and so is the whole hierarchical ensemble. The whole system is busy, always in flux; transactions take place at an ever-accelerating rate. We have reached the stage where the structure relies almost wholly on the co-optation of forces that are more or less outside its control. A prime example is the actual a.s.sistance given by modernizing leftist regimes in South America. The issue is not so much that of the outcome of neo-liberal economics in particular, but of the success of the left in power at furthering self-managed capital and co-opting indigenous resistance into its...o...b..t, in the service of enforcing productivist logic in general.

But these tactics do not outweigh the fact of an overall inner rigidity that puts the future of techno-capital at grave risk. The name of the crisis is modernity itself, its contingent, c.u.mulative weight. Any regime today is in a situation where every "solution" only deepens the engulfing problems. More technology and more coercive force are the only resources to fall back on. The "dark side" of progress stands revealed as the definitive face of modern times.

Theorists such as Giddens and Beck admit that the outer limits of modernity have been reached, so that disaster is now the latent characteristic of society. And yet they hold out hope, without predicating basic change, that all will be well. Beck, for instance, calls for a democratization of industrialism and technological change-carefully avoiding the question of why this has never happened.

There is no reconciliation, no happy ending within this totality, and it is transparently false to claim otherwise. History seems to have liquidated the possibility of redemption; its very course undoes what has been pa.s.sing as critical thought. The lesson is to notice how much must change to establish a new and genuinely viable direction. There never was a moment of choosing; the field or ground of life s.h.i.+fts imperceptibly in a mult.i.tude of ways, without drama, but to vast effect. If the solution were sought in technology, that would of course only reinforce the rule of modern domination; this is a major part of the challenge that confronts us.

Modernity has reduced the scope allowed for ethical action, cutting off its potentially effective outlets. But reality, forcing itself upon us as the crisis mounts, is becoming proximal and insistent once again. Thinking gnaws away at everything, because this situation corrodes everything we have wanted. We realize that it is up to us. Even the likelihood of a collapse of the global techno-structure should not lure us away from acknowledgement of our decisive potential roles, our responsibility to stop the engine of destruction. Pa.s.sivity, like a defeated att.i.tude, will not bring forth deliverance.

We are all wounded, and paradoxically, this estrangement becomes the basis for communality. A gathering of the traumatized may be forming, a spiritual kins.h.i.+p demanding recovery. Because we can still feel acutely, our rulers can rest no more easily than we do. Our deep need for healing means that an overthrow must take place. That alone would const.i.tute healing. Things "just go on", creating the catastrophe on every level. People are figuring it out: that things just go on is, in fact, the catastrophe.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson expressed it this way: "Suddenly now it hits, bizarrely easy to grasp. We are inexorably heading for the Big Goodbye. It's official! The unthinkable is ready to be thought. It is finally in sight, after all of human history behind us. In the pit of what is left of your miserable soul you feel it coming, the definitive loss of home, bigger than the cause of one person's tears. Yours and mine, the private sob, will be joined by a ma.s.s crying......

Misery. Immiseration. Time to get back to where we have never quite given up wanting to be. "Stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more," in Spengler's phrase.

Enlightenment thought, along with the industrial Revolution, began in late 18th century Europe, inaugurating modernity. We were promised freedom based on conscious control over our destiny. But Enlightenment claims have not been realized, and the whole project has turned out to be self-defeating. Foundational elements including reason, universal rights and the laws of science were consciously designed to jettison pre-scientific, mystical sorts of knowledge. Diverse, communally sustained lifeways were sacrificed in the name of a unitary and uniform, law-enforced pattern of living. Kant's emphasis on freedom through moral action is rooted in this context, along with the French encyclopedists' program to replace traditional crafts with more up-to-date technological systems. Kant, by the way, for whom propertywas sanctified by no less than his categorical imperative, favorably compared the modern university to an industrial machine and its products.

Various Enlightenment figures debated the pros and cons of emerging modern developments, and these few words obviously cannot do justice to the topic of Enlightenment. However, it may be fruitful to keep this important historical conjunction in mind: the nearly simultaneous births of modern progressive thought and ma.s.s production. Apt in this regard is the perspective of Min Lin: "Concealing the social origin of cognitive discourses and the idea of certainty is the inner requirement of modern Western ideology in order to justify or legitimate its position by universalizing its intellectual basis and creating a new sacred quasi-transcendance."$ Modernity is always trying to go beyond itself to a different state, lurching forward as if to recover the equilibrium lost so long ago. It is bent on changing the future-even its own-because it destroys the present. More modernity is needed to heal the wounds modernity inflicts!

With modernity's stress on freedom, modern enlightened inst.i.tutions have in fact succeeded in nothing so much as conformity. Lyotard summed up the overall outcome: "A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul."9 Ma.s.sified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the actual control program of modernity.