Well burrowed, old mole!

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“It’s hard to resist the temptation to hope for disaster, for systemic collapse…an event that will destroy the whole thing….but who is it that suffers, that dies in those events? It’s not the well-heeled  banker…a die-off can’t be a political program…”

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We live in a world that is not the best of all possible worlds.  We are haunted by the possibility of a better world, and the absence of any necessary reason for it being as bad as it is. Our feelings and thoughts are born from this disjointure.  Each day we come up against the arbitrariness, the groundlessness, the senselessness of our suffering.  Global media coverage of the world–the news the adverts, the films–the entire Spectacle, is the means by which corporate power mediates, gets in between us and the world, between us and our thoughts and feelings, between our thoughts and feelings.  It is the means by which, although we do not notice any physical movement, we are displaced into their world.   

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How are we to react to this insane state of affairs?

The commodity world that corporate power offers us kills us, and we become spectators to our own collective suicide ecological, political and emotional. Under these circumstances, it is perfectly reasonable to exert force to remove the obstacles to our survival, if not flourishing. 

It has become apparent on watching recent “coverage” of the world, the 24-hour web-spinning of the global media, that there is a deep emotional investment in disaster being created here.  One could say that people have a natural fixation on scenes of suffering, and that the coverage is merely pandering to that given emotional fascination; but, if we realize that people also have a contrary inclination to turn away from or ignore such scenes, a different thesis suggests itself.  The ‘coverage’ enacts a selection, a filtration, a ranking of these supposedly natural dispositions, remaking the world and the subject supposedly watching in the very act of presenting.      

Spectacle displaces the desire for violence against the system into a desire for a fantastic ‘act of god’ as the superstorm supplement to the parliamentarian farce.

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Philosophy is the name for the only politics that answers the spectacle.