Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the 'neighbour'?And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think?
Violence, Slavoj Zizek
What luck for leaders that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler
In a world increasingly dominated by the 'city' and its pressures, noises, and distortions, it becomes increasingly difficult for those growing up in such a pressure cooker to find not just a way out of this stramash, but more vitally a way in to one's self. It is this in - this entrance to one's Self - that is blocked by the noise and pressures - the violence - of the workaday world. And if one cannot find a way in, and excavate the Self (while it's still reachable) from beneath the rubble of an ecologically-existentially shattered society, then the violence of one's living will continue unabated and unchecked.
Violence, Slavoj Zizek
What luck for leaders that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler
In a world increasingly dominated by the 'city' and its pressures, noises, and distortions, it becomes increasingly difficult for those growing up in such a pressure cooker to find not just a way out of this stramash, but more vitally a way in to one's self. It is this in - this entrance to one's Self - that is blocked by the noise and pressures - the violence - of the workaday world. And if one cannot find a way in, and excavate the Self (while it's still reachable) from beneath the rubble of an ecologically-existentially shattered society, then the violence of one's living will continue unabated and unchecked.
By violence I mean existential and ecological violence (Zizek calls it 'systemic' violence, endemic to our socio-economic order) where one's nature is papered over, so that one no longer knows who or where one is. By 'where' I mean a place that nourishes. If this where does not nourish being it is not a place but a non-place or a product. If one inhabits this non-place long enough one becomes a non-entity. A non-entity that has no vested interest any longer in place or in the where or who. It is this uprooted non-entity that commits violent acts without thinking of them as violent:
Abandoning your locomotive force to a machine whose violence is not just in disembodying you from space and sealing you up behind screen and speed (thus altering your perception of the world for the worse), but in polluting yourself (the ambient pollution within a car being driven is higher than the pollution outside it) and the environment one is being mechanically prammed through. The automobile and driving is perhaps the most violent of all our acts yet possibly also the most innocuous. Yet this is the deviousness of our economic model that is neither eco-nomic nor eco-logic: to pull the wool over your eyes, to swaddle your very being in comfort ease and convenience so that you become more and more amenable to more and more comfort... Man's life has effectively within our modern age of capitalism become more and more pedomorphic, that is, child-like and infantile. Adolescence, that period of growth between childhood and adulthood, is now far longer than what it used to be. One might even argue that evolution and a small-minded socialization process have combined to render man's whole life as entirely adolescent. Man, as such, remains in a permanent state of boyishness and pre-maturity. He indulges his whims without any wide-ranging concern for the larger matrix within which his actions are contained and 'act'. It is this 'unthinking' (or Violence if you prefer) that sees our oceans with islands larger than Texas made entirely of our disposable and non-biodegradable waste; and more importantly, why this is not broadcast every evening on prime-time television until we do something about it.
But then, you could argue that television is a form of violence also (Jerry Mander did, very convincingly in his 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television, as did Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death), a nefarious form of mesmerism that sees our children raised not by humans but by the spurious messages delivered electronically via the cathode ray tube in our brains.
Then
you could look at the language of these messages and see that language
itself, instead of being an instrument of lucidity, has been weaponized
like everything else under the banner of capitalism to make you obey, to make you consume more than you need.
Then there is our violent education system which sees more import in setting our children up for the capitalist ballgame instead of releasing them into their selves through inculcating an intimate relationship with Nature.
Then there is the workaday world and the world of toil. It is a measure of the previous point that (language as violence) that we think of this toil as 'work', yet 'work' is not toil, not even close. Toil is that which is unnecessary and non-essential, that is not vitally nourishing. Work re-invigorates and re-connects naturally and essentially; toil depletes and exhausts, and fragments to the point of nihilism. In the former we have wholeness and health, in the latter, emptiness and dis-ease.
In a circular universe let's not forget, the price of ease is dis-ease...
All
this violence (against place, language, work) is nothing more that the
violation of one's existential Self, an open structured self that
includes all things by way of not being separate from them. One is
brought up in the world of men as a product, or as a pet. One is named
even before one is born, the naming process being nothing more than the
beginning of separation and discrimination. This is further reinforced
as one is reared within the unnatural enclosures of one's home, school
and society. One is dominated from birth by one's parents, as they
themselves were dominated and domesticated by theirs. All domestication
thus becomes domination, the two words derive from the same root, and all parents become terrorists, as they now terrorize you into conforming to societal ways, and to embracing the rules of the prison.
Effectively then, civilization is some kind of penitentiary. In the capitalized world, one is born into imprisonment and reared by the guards of that prison (the teachers, the parents, the television presenters). The right of all creatures to live naturally is rescinded by way of the fact that the land has been parceled up and sold. There is no freedom anymore, freedom being nothing more than the existential right of every living creature to be at one with its natural environment, and to have at their disposal the sacred right of migration to move across this earth without being unnaturally blocked by walls or fences or political borders.
Now, I have to 'buy' the land to even attempt to live as Nature intended, otherwise I run the risk of being hounded as a trespasser. Yet, the real trespassers are those that have put a price on our heads and on the land, who formulate rules to prevent the natural course of events from ever taking place. All property is not just a form of theft but a violation against the very self and against the very thing that has been appropriated.
Property is just another prop, another crutch, to keep man from falling down, and from touching and smelling the gentle earth.
This
morning, Boxing Day, I listened cautiously to some commercial
shop-owners being interviewed on Radio 4 (or is that Radio Bore?), about
their sales and their tactics (to get people to consume more than they
need). I say cautiously because what now passes for news these days is
more often than not a concealed directive to play along with society's
ways, and to consume. Most programs and films when they're not just
downright offensive with their puerile and fantastical messages are
simply advertisements for the orthodox conventions of the day. At any rate,
apart from the inarticulacy of the interviewees (how expressive can you get when your whole life revolves around selling
'shit you don't need'?), I was alarmed at just how glib and blase most
were regarding current states of consumption. One interviewee even had
the nerve to say, 'Oh there's the Blue Planet box set, half price,
that's fun.' I mean, seriously? It's this sort of cognitive dissonance -
Oh the world is drowning beneath our plastic, but there's the Blue
Planet box set... despite everyone having seen it on telly a few weeks
back - that makes the workaday world go round. It doesn't even enter the
mind that that box set will invariably end up in landfill in a few
years, and/or find itself floating about in our oceans as a veritable new species, Boxus settus non-biodegradabulus, in its own right. This is the Violence I speak of, Violence with a capital V: the
cognitive disconnect that allows us to perform such actions whilst
denying their overarching consequences. It is a sort of self-propelled
insanity, that violently and aggressively sells the Earth (and the organism with it) down the plastic-strewn river, whilst we all jump about gaily.
Selling,
then, is a form of violence. In a sane society, nobody sells, and there
is no such thing as 'money'. All commerce is effected through barter
and exchange, through trading in practical local materials, and 'local economics'. That way, excess
and wealth is avoided. And to a large part, greed too. The emphasis becomes growth of community, home and family - soul and spirit of place in which creatures and environment are harmoniously bound together - instead of the mere accumulation of 'stuff' as a function of your new-found status anxiety. The perversions of greed and want and disease that have emerged out of a perverted system (a system that has turned away from Nature and been turned through [per + vertere] an unnatural eco-nomy [the exploitation of Nature]) are replaced by their natural counterparts, frugality and fruitfulness, and wholeness. In this situation, the local takes precedence over the global, and place is resuscitated to reveal the earth within it.
Growth then becomes something other than what Capitalism has made of it, as the mere accretion of matter around a nucleus. It becomes a spread of energies on all sides; a synergetic enterprise between organism and organism, and organism and environment.
In fact, 'economic growth' in today's modern market world has become pornographic, not just in the stuff that gets sold but in the actual act itself, the word 'porn' deriving from the Ancient Greek word pernanai, which derives itself from the Proto-Indo-European root per-, meaning to traffic in, or to sell.
Buying too (as 'Shopping' and 'Perverted Consumption'), as the modern state has made it, is a violent act. Shops engage in aggressive marketing and advertising to force through the stuff that is not sold. The language that surrounds this palaver has been taken straight out of a military tactician's handbook. If they could, sellers would taser you into buying their rubbish, but they can't so they just psychologize the violence (which is less noticeable to the witless observer) and advertise instead. All of this of course is a perversion of the natural order: natural consumption and need perverted into unnatural consumption and want, so that one can presumably un-equal one's self from everyone else. This is the basis of the modern day society - inequality, discrimination, and imprisonment - and yet so many under the spell of it, cannot see it, but actually celebrate it.
Growth then becomes something other than what Capitalism has made of it, as the mere accretion of matter around a nucleus. It becomes a spread of energies on all sides; a synergetic enterprise between organism and organism, and organism and environment.
In fact, 'economic growth' in today's modern market world has become pornographic, not just in the stuff that gets sold but in the actual act itself, the word 'porn' deriving from the Ancient Greek word pernanai, which derives itself from the Proto-Indo-European root per-, meaning to traffic in, or to sell.
Buying too (as 'Shopping' and 'Perverted Consumption'), as the modern state has made it, is a violent act. Shops engage in aggressive marketing and advertising to force through the stuff that is not sold. The language that surrounds this palaver has been taken straight out of a military tactician's handbook. If they could, sellers would taser you into buying their rubbish, but they can't so they just psychologize the violence (which is less noticeable to the witless observer) and advertise instead. All of this of course is a perversion of the natural order: natural consumption and need perverted into unnatural consumption and want, so that one can presumably un-equal one's self from everyone else. This is the basis of the modern day society - inequality, discrimination, and imprisonment - and yet so many under the spell of it, cannot see it, but actually celebrate it.
The
long and short of it is that our society is Violent at its base, every
capitalist society having been engineered off the backs of the disposable workhorse
that were previous generations. The very architecture
of any given city is testament enough to this bloodletting and violation of a natural order, and yet we celebrate
it as if somehow stupidity had become a virtue.
Alas! It has. The stupor has got you. The American essayist Charles Olsen
called it the 'satanic glitter' (Christmas being an especially prominent
time for this!), Jerry Mander referred to it as the quicksilver mask
that enraptures the small fish about to be harpooned. Debord called it 'generalized autism', whilst Agamben refers to it as 'the apparatus' that opposes the animal that we essentially are. The modern day mind finds favour with the zombie and the ghoul (unthinking creatures whose appetites cannot be satiated). Yet, whatever the curse we have hypnotized ourselves with, the human is nowhere to be seen.
It's interesting to note the etymology of the word 'violate' - from the Proto-Indo-European root *weie- 'to chase after, pursue with vigor or desire'. This craving for, and hankering after, is at the root of our violence, and is cleverly concealed beneath modern day ambition. Whether it be our dreams (more often than not delusions spurred on by the capitalist-conventional mandate) that we chase after or 'careers' (the word 'career' stems from the same root as 'car' and 'carry'), we are, from the get-go, under the cosh of 'Violence' and covetousness, and the conventional thinking of the day (which of course is not thinking at all but thinking in fragments).
So, either you are some kind of unthinking, undiscerning ghoul who consumes without thinking, or a human being. There is no halfway house.
It's interesting to note the etymology of the word 'violate' - from the Proto-Indo-European root *weie- 'to chase after, pursue with vigor or desire'. This craving for, and hankering after, is at the root of our violence, and is cleverly concealed beneath modern day ambition. Whether it be our dreams (more often than not delusions spurred on by the capitalist-conventional mandate) that we chase after or 'careers' (the word 'career' stems from the same root as 'car' and 'carry'), we are, from the get-go, under the cosh of 'Violence' and covetousness, and the conventional thinking of the day (which of course is not thinking at all but thinking in fragments).
So, either you are some kind of unthinking, undiscerning ghoul who consumes without thinking, or a human being. There is no halfway house.
So, what to do?
Un-pet the self! Examine your Karma! Learn your Essence! Start thinking for yourself.
And wake up to the Violence hidden in plain sight!
FREE
Born free
to be caught
and fashioned
and shaped
and freed to wander
within
a caged
dream of tears.
Merle Collins
Then there is the worst violence of them all - the brainwashing of our new born into a system of violence that sees nature and the organism as disposable and exploitable. The selling of childhood is the most miserable thing you could possibly do to a child, reconfiguring it away from its natural matrices into a galaxy of toil, convention, and stress. Yet, this is par for the course for the modern day capitalist state. We now have hyper-parenting and zero hour lessons, teens and pre-teens suffering from stress related disorders and exhibiting signs of depression. I speak from experience having taught swathes of 'young adults' in a variety of countries, notably in Warsaw, Poland, where half of my young adult classes had bags under their eyes that could have passed as suitcases, in spite of their average age being only 15. I regularly cycle past the SECC and see parents lining up with their children for the latest round of 'pop-idolisation'. It's horrific to see so many children being inculcated into this televisual, celebritized universe. The result is that the televisual soon becomes a state of being in the world, where things cannot be seen close-up, but only from a blurry distance. The image takes precedence over the word, and soon people can only garble and mumble in unintelligible sounds.
As for the celebrity side of things, this is arguably worse, where one's most sacred power - anonymity (which is really the flipside of omni-nymity) - is readily sold to the highest bidder without so much as a second thought (thinking is not something we readily do in the prammed society) as to what we are actually doing. What we are effectively doing when we buy into fame is selling out our existential solidarity with all breathing creatures (and even those who do not breathe). It is a quest for approval, an infantile grasping for attention and recognition, which is compounded by our ego-bound self. It is the way we have been raised, to be unique, to be individual (or 'dividual' as Deleuze correctly asserts), to be better than all the rest. Even the Jesuits who tried to educate me had their motto - Ad Majora Natus Sum (Born for Greater Things) - yet what greater spokesman can a child have than Nature herself: the Unnamed, the Ego-less?
FREE
Born free
to be caught
and fashioned
and shaped
and freed to wander
within
a caged
dream of tears.
Merle Collins
Then there is the worst violence of them all - the brainwashing of our new born into a system of violence that sees nature and the organism as disposable and exploitable. The selling of childhood is the most miserable thing you could possibly do to a child, reconfiguring it away from its natural matrices into a galaxy of toil, convention, and stress. Yet, this is par for the course for the modern day capitalist state. We now have hyper-parenting and zero hour lessons, teens and pre-teens suffering from stress related disorders and exhibiting signs of depression. I speak from experience having taught swathes of 'young adults' in a variety of countries, notably in Warsaw, Poland, where half of my young adult classes had bags under their eyes that could have passed as suitcases, in spite of their average age being only 15. I regularly cycle past the SECC and see parents lining up with their children for the latest round of 'pop-idolisation'. It's horrific to see so many children being inculcated into this televisual, celebritized universe. The result is that the televisual soon becomes a state of being in the world, where things cannot be seen close-up, but only from a blurry distance. The image takes precedence over the word, and soon people can only garble and mumble in unintelligible sounds.
As for the celebrity side of things, this is arguably worse, where one's most sacred power - anonymity (which is really the flipside of omni-nymity) - is readily sold to the highest bidder without so much as a second thought (thinking is not something we readily do in the prammed society) as to what we are actually doing. What we are effectively doing when we buy into fame is selling out our existential solidarity with all breathing creatures (and even those who do not breathe). It is a quest for approval, an infantile grasping for attention and recognition, which is compounded by our ego-bound self. It is the way we have been raised, to be unique, to be individual (or 'dividual' as Deleuze correctly asserts), to be better than all the rest. Even the Jesuits who tried to educate me had their motto - Ad Majora Natus Sum (Born for Greater Things) - yet what greater spokesman can a child have than Nature herself: the Unnamed, the Ego-less?
