Twilight Of The Machines Part 2

By their very t.i.tles, recent books like All Connected Now. Life in the First Global Civilization and What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives express the resignation to an ever more standardized and bereft situation. Such works express the creative exhaustion and moral bankruptcy of the age, in which ma.s.sive dehumanization and rampant destruction of nature vie for fulfillment of their interrelated projects.

1997-98 saw several months of smoke all across Southeast Asia as four million hectares of forests burned. Four years later, hundreds of fires raged for many weeks across eastern Australia, set by bored teenagers. In the U.S., groundwater and soil pollution levels have risen measurably because of concentrations of anti-depressants in human urine. Alienation in society and the annihilation of plant and animal communities join in a ghastly, interlocked dance of violence against health and life.

Reified existence progressively disables whatever and whoever questions it. How else to account for the stunningly accommodation ist nature of postmodernism, allergic to any questioning of the basics of the reigning techno-capitalist malignancy? And yet a questioning is emerging, and is fast taking shape as the deep impetus of a renewed social movement.

As the life-world's vital signs worsen on every level, the best minds should be paying close attention and seeking solutions. Instead, most have found an infinitude of ways to ponder the paralyzing dichotomy of civilization versus nature, unable to reach an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. A few farsighted individuals began the questioning in modern times. Horkheimer came to realize that domination of nature and humans, and the instrumental reason behind that domination, flow from the "deepest layers of civilization." Bataille grasped that "the very movement in which man negates Mother Earth who gave birth to him, opens the path to subjugation."

After about thirty years without social movements, we are seeing a rebirth. Driven and informed by the growing crisis in every sphere, reaching deeper for understanding and critique than did the movement of the 196os, the new movement is "anarchist," for want of a better term. Ever since the several days' anti-World Trade Organization militancy in the streets of Seattle in November 1999, the orientation of anti-globalization has become steadily more evident. "Anarchism is the dominant perspective within the movement," Barbara Epstein judged in a fall Zoos report. Esther Kaplan observed in February 2002 that "as the months have rolled by since Seattle, more and more activists, with little fanfare, have come to explicitly identify as anarchists, and anarchist-minded collectives are on the rise.... The anarchist fringe is fast becoming the movement's center." David Graeber put it even more suc- cinctly:'Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what's new and hopeful about it."

Henry Kissinger referred to the anti-globalization protests of 1999 and 2000 as "early warning signals" of a "potential political weight" in the industrialized countries and the Third World, as a threat to the world system itself. A CIA report that became public in spring 2000, "Global Trends 2015," predicted that the biggest obstacle to globalization in the new millennium would be a possible joining together of the "First World" protest movement with the struggles of indigenous people to maintain their integrity against encroaching capital and technology.

Which introduces a more important question about this movement and its threatening connection to the centuries of struggles against Empire in the not-yet-industrialized world. Namely, if it is increasingly anarchy-oriented, what does this anarchism consist of?

I think it is fairly clear that it is becoming something other than part of the left. Until now, every modern anti-capitalist movement had at its core an acceptance of the expansion of the means of production and the continuing development of technology. Now there is an explicit refusal of this productionist orientation; it is in the ascendant in the new anarchy movement.

This anarcho-primitivist (or simply primitivist) tendency knows that to account for today's grim realities there needs to be a deeper look at inst.i.tutions once almost universally taken for granted. Despite the postmodern ban on investigation of these inst.i.tutions' origins, the new outlook brings even division of labor and domestication into question as ultimate root causes of our present extremity of existence. Technology, meaning a system of ever greater division of labor or specialization, is indicted as the motor of ever greater technicization of the life-world. Civilization, which arrives when division of labor reaches the stage that produces domestication, is also now seen as deeply problematic. Whereas the domestication of animals and plants was once a.s.sumed as a given, now its logic is brought into focus. To see the meaning of genetic engineering and human cloning, for example, is to grasp them as implicit in the basic move to domination of nature, which is domestication. Though it is apparent that this critical approach raises more questions than it answers, a developing anarchy consciousness that does not aim at definitive answers cannot turn back.

Cannot turn back to the old, failed left, that is. Who doesn't know at this point that something different is urgently needed?

One of the touchstones or inspirations of primitivist anarchy is the paradigm s.h.i.+ft in the fields of anthropology and archaeology in recent decades, concerning human social life during "prehistory." Civilization appeared only some 9,000 years ago. Its duration is dwarfed by the thousands of human generations who enjoyed what might be called a state of natural anarchy. The general orthodoxy in the anthropological literature, even including textbooks, portrays life outside of civilization as one of ample leisure time; an egalitarian, food-sharing mode of life; relative autonomy or equality of the s.e.xes; and the absence of organized violence.

Humans used fire to cook fibrous vegetables almost two million years ago, and navigated on the open seas at least 8oo,ooo years ago.. They had an intelligence equal to ours, and enjoyed by far the most successful, non-destructive human adaptation to the natural world that has ever existed. Whereas the textbook question used to be, "Why did it take h.o.m.o so long to adopt domestication or agriculture?" now texts ask why they did it at all.

As the negative and even terminal fruits of technology and civilization become ever clearer, the s.h.i.+ft to a luddite, anti-civilization politics makes greater sense all the time. It is not very surprising to detect its influence being registered in various circ.u.mstances, including that of the ma.s.sive anti-G8 protests in Genoa, Julya001.300,000 people took part and $50 million in damage was caused. The Italian minister of the interior blamed the anarchist "black bloc," and its supposed primitivist outlook in particular, for the level of militancy.

How much time do we have to effect what is necessary to save the biosphere and our very humanness? The old approaches are so many discredited efforts to run this world, which is a ma.s.sified grid of production and estrangement. Green or primitivist anarchy prefers the vista of radically decentralized, face-to-face community, based on what nature can give rather than on how complete domination of nature can become. Our vision runs directly counter to the dominant trajectory of technology and capital, for the most obvious of reasons.

The left has failed monumentally, in terms of the individual and in terms of nature. Meanwhile, the distance between the left and the new anarchy movement keeps widening. Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Rorty, for instance, long absurdly for a renewed connection between intellectuals and unions, as if this chimera would somehow change anything on a basic level. Jurgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms is an apologetic for things as they are, blind to the real colonization of modern life, and even more uncritical and affirmative than his previous works. Hardt and Negri speak to the choice involved rather directly: "We would be anarchists if we were not to speak... from the standpoint of a materiality const.i.tuted in the networks of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively.... No, we are not anarchists but communists." Conversely, to further clarify the issue, Jesus Sepulveda observed that "anarchy and indigenous movements fight against the civilized order and its practice of standardization."

Not all anarchists subscribe to the increasing suspicions about technology and civilization. Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, for example, insist on the traditional embrace of progressive development. The marxian heart of anarcho-syndicalism typifies this adherence and is fading away with its leftist relatives.

Marx, who knew so much about the impact of the productive process and its destructive course as division of labor, nonetheless believed (or wanted to believe) that the technological dynamic would undermine capitalism. But "all that is solid" does not "melt into air"; rather it becomes more like what it always was. This is as true for civilization as for capitalism.

And civilization now has the form technology gives it, inseparable from the rest of the social order-the world landscape of capital-and embodying and expressing its deepest values. "We have only purely technological conditions left," concluded Heidegger, whose formulation is itself sufficient to expose the myth of technology's "neutrality."

At its origin in division of labor and until now, technology has been an a.s.sumption, repressed as an object of attention. At the point when generalized technicization characterizes the world and is the most dominant aspect of modern life, the veil is being lifted. Technology's invasive colonization of everyday life and systematic displacement of the physical environment can no longer be ignored or concealed. A thousand questions push forward.

Health is just one, as we witness the resurgence and multiplication of diseases, increasingly resistant to the industrial medicine that claimed to be erasing them. Antidepressants mask some of the symptoms of rising levels of sorrow, depression, anxiety, and despair, while we are supposed to remain in the dark about the multisensory richness, diversity, and immediacy that technology leaches out of our lives. Cybers.p.a.ce promises connection, empowerment, variety to people who have never been so isolated, disempowered, and standardized. Each new study confirms that even a few hours' internet use produces the latter effects. Technology has also served to extend the reach of work via the many gadgets, especially cell phones, beepers, and email, that keep millions in harness regardless of time or place.

What is the cultural ethos that has blunted criticism and resistance and, in effect, legitimated the illegitimate? None other than postmodernism, which may have finally reached the nadir of its moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Seyla Benhabib provides a compelling version of postmodern thought in three theses: "the death of man understood as the death of the autonomous, self-reflective subject, capable of acting on principle; the death of history, understood as the severance of the epistemic interest in history of struggling groups in constructing their past narratives; the death of metaphysics, understood as the impossibility of criticizing or legitimizing inst.i.tutions, practices, and traditions other than through the immanent appeal to self-legitimation of'small narratives'." Marshall Berman encapsulates postmodernism as "a philosophy of despair masquerading as radical intellectual chic... the counterpoint to the civilizational collapse going on around us."

Postmodernists champion diversity, difference, and heterogeneity, choosing to see reality as fluid and indeterminate. The actual parallel to this att.i.tude is found in the movement of commodities with brief shelf-lives, circulating meaninglessly in a globalized, fast-food hip consumerism. Postmodernism insists on surface, and is at pains to discredit any notion of authenticity. No deep meanings are accepted; universals of any kind are scorned in favor of a supposed particularity. The meaning of a universal, h.o.m.ogenizing technology, on the other hand, is not only unquestioned, but is embraced. The connection between the imperialism of technology and the loss of meaning in society never dawns on the postmodernists.

Born of the defeat of the movements of the 196os and grown ever more embarra.s.singly impoverished during the post-'6os decades of defeat and reaction, postmodernism is the name for prostration before the monstrous facts. Happy to accept the present as one of technonature and technoculture, Donna Haraway epitomizes the postmodern surrender. Technology, it seems, always was; there is no way to stand outside its culture; the "natural" is no more than the pervasive naturalization of culture. In sum, there is no "nature" to defend, "we're all cyborgs." This stance is obviously of benefit in the war against nature; more specifically in the wars against women, indigenous cultures, surviving species, indeed against all of non-engineered life.

For Haraway, technological prosthesis "becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves" as we merge with the machine. "Technoscience... [is] unmistakably science for us." Unsurprisingly, she has chided those who would resist genetic engineering, with the reminder that the world is too "unsettled, dirty" for simplistic verdicts about the practices of technoscience. In truth, opposing it is "redactive" and "foolish."

Sadly, there are all too many who follow her path of capitulation to the death-trip we've been forced on. Daniel R. White writes, rather incredibly, of "a postmodern-ecological rubric that steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and the Oppressed." He further muses, echoing Haraway: "We are all becoming cyborgs. What sort of creatures do we want to be? Do we want to be creatures at all? Would machines be better? What kinds of machines might we become?"

Michel Foucault was, of course, a key postmodern figure whose influence has not been liberatory. He ended up losing his way in the area of power, concluding that power is everywhere and nowhere; this argument facilitated the postmodern conceit that opposing oppression is pa.s.se. More specifically, Foucault determined that resisting technology is futile, and that human relations are inescapably technological.

The postmodern period, according to Paul Virilio, is "the era of the sudden industrialization of the end, the all-out globalization of the havoc wreaked by progress." We must move past postmodern accommodation and undo this progress.

Civilization is the foundation that decides the rest. As Freud noted, "there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform." "Difficulties" stemming from the origin of civilization as the forced renunciation of Eros and instinctual freedom; "difficulties" that, as he predicted, will produce a state of universal neurosis.

Freud also referred to "the sense of guilt produced by civilization... [which] remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction." The magnitude of the offense which is civilization explains this great, continuing quantum of guilt, especially since the continual re-enactment of the offense-the curbing of instinctual freedom- is necessary to maintain the coercion and destructiveness that is civilization.

Spengler, Tainter and many others concur that collapse is inherent in civilizations. We may be approaching the collapse of this civilization more quickly than we can grasp, with results even more unimaginable. Along with the rapid degradation of the physical world, are we not seeing a disintegration of the symbol system of Western civilization? So many ways to register the sinking credibility of what is ever more nakedly the direct rule of technology and capital. Weber, for example, identified the disfiguring or marginalization of face-to-face ethical sensibilities as the most significant consequence of modern processes of development.

The list of crimes is virtually endless. The question is whether or not, when the civilization comes down, it will be allowed to recycle into one more variant of the original crime.

The new movement replies in the negative. Primitivists draw strength from their understanding that no matter how bereft our lives have become in the last ten thousand years, for most of our nearly two million years on the planet, human life appears to have been healthy and authentic. We are moving, this anti-authoritarian current, in the direction of primitive naturalism, and against a totality that moves so precisely away from that condition. As Dario Fo put it, "The best thing today is this fantastic breeze and sun-these young people who are organizing themselves across the world." Another Italian voice filled out this sentiment admirably: "And then at bottom, what really is this globalization of which so many speak? Perhaps the process of the expansion of markets toward the exploitation of the poorest countries and of their resources and away from the richer countries? Perhaps the standardization of culture and the diffusion of a dominant model? But then, why not use the term civilization that certainly sounds less menacing but is fitting, without the necessity of a neologism. There is no doubt that the media-and not just the media-have an interest in mixing everything in a vague anti-globalization soup. So it's up to us to bring clarity to things, to make deep critiques and act in consequence." (Terra Salvaggio, July 2000).

It's an all or nothing struggle. Anarchy is just a name for those who embrace its promise of redemption and wholeness, and try to face up to how far we'll need to travel to get there. We humans once had it right, if the anthropologists are to be believed. Now we'll find out if we can get it right again.

Quite possibly our last opportunity as a species.

Exiled from Presence.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being keeps occurring to me, in a mocking sort of way. Not so much the substance of Kundera's novel, but the t.i.tle itself. It is the "lightness" of an ever-more-complete disembodiment that is p.r.o.nounced-and becoming unbearable. A fully technified existence is overtaking us, redefining everything according to the terms of what is not present. It is the triumph of the virtual, the cyber/ cyborgian/digital. We exist in the age of floating Data and dispossessed people where the remote reigns, under the surveillance of an information Technology hypercomplexity.

"We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word," says a character in Alan Lightman's novel, Reunion.' Virtual. Almost. Receding. As Stephen Erickson put it, "Philosophy itself surely is at a crossroad, a marker for which is a pervasive kind of emptiness."'

A trend toward disembodiment is not only an abiding strain of Western intellectual history; it is an inescapable result of civilization. For at least io,ooo years, the very ground of our shared existence as humans has been s.h.i.+fting, drawing us away from being present to the world, to each other, to ourselves.

Descartes found it problematic that embodiment shapes our understanding of the world. His project was to overcome the limitations of a body that clouds the mind's purchase on the world. The Cartesian outlook is as central to the logic of modern technology as it is to Descartes' position as the founder of modern philosophy.

We now inhabit a world whose condition is not quite fatal, where modernity is completing the abolition of nature. Is there an escape hatch from this destructive course? Who is looking for a way out? The antidote to Descartes-and the terminal progress he helped engender-may become clearer, sooner than we think. The results of not changing everything about human culture loom ahead, increasingly predictable and even obvious. A radical s.h.i.+ft is essential to avert disaster.' In referring to "the sensory modes and philosophical genius of indigenous peoples," Paul Shepard4 provided a benchmark reminder that the answers we seek may be very old, and still applicable.

The dominant counter-voices are prevailing, needless to say, and delivering on their Cartesian promises. "Perhaps one day virtual environments, and the synthetic reasoning they allow to emerge, will become the tools we need ...in our search for a better destiny for humanity," offers Manuel de Landa.s Perhaps, tragically, this desperate, hopeless gambling away of what's left of this planet will only be refused when things get far worse.

In the early to mid-loth century, a few voices rose in opposition to Descartes' cult of disembodiment. For the phenomenologically oriented philosopher Edmund Husserl, bodily perception is the prime starting point for thought. Embodiment, or presence, is foundational and lies beyond the operation of language. Describing the origins of human consciousness, Husserl held that an undivided self preceded humankind's adoption of symbolic thought.

The postmodern outlook began with Heidegger's break with the concept of a foundational presence. Derrida's early, defining texts of the 195os and i96os were part of his effort to discredit Husserl's basic premise. Derrida approached the term presence as essentially a s.p.a.ce outside of representation. In his view, it is an illusion to imagine that such a non-mediated condition has ever existed. Because Husserl questioned whether all experience is necessarily subject to objectification and separation, Derrida had to take him on.

Against Husserl's watchword, "Return to the things themselves,"6 Derrida opposed his famous dictum that there is nothing outside language or symbolic culture. In his words, "Certainly nothing has preceded this [mediated] situation. a.s.suredly nothing will suspend it." Postmodernism, the handmaiden of technoculture's malignant spread, must deny that matters were ever outside the realm of estrangement, or ever will be.

Deconstruction is in the end always aimed at presence, and makes one very important point. It exposes the illusion whereby language evokes an object's presence, rather than its absence. But deconstructionists over-shoot the mark when they declare that there is nothing of meaning outside the text.

Derrida begins with the notion that the subject can have no selfpresence except by hearing him or herself speak. This view of consciousness fails to acknowledge that thought is not solely linguistic, even in this overly symbolized world (viz. dreaming, listening to and playing music, sports, and countless other examples). For Derrida, "It is difficult to conceive anything at all beyond representation."8 In true Cartesian fas.h.i.+on, Derrida flees embodiment and the possibility of a world directly lived. It's telling that he views time as a metaphysical conceptuality, rather than an onerous dimension that can serve as an index of alienation.

With language, the body retreats, effacing itself. When the mouth produces linguistic signs (words), the rest of the body disappears. Presence has an inverse relations.h.i.+p to language; it is most apparent when people are silent. Especially in its written form, language stands separate from the non-reified, processual flow of life. The creator of the Cherokee writing system, Sequoyah, observed that "White men make what they know fast on paper like catching a wild animal and taming it."9 In the 18th century, Rousseau attacked representation in the name of unmediated presence. His goal of fully "transparent" relations.h.i.+ps implies that representation is the undoing of that which must necessarily be face-to-face. Derrida, on the other hand (echoing Hegel) views the notion of a transparent relations.h.i.+p as mere nostalgic fantasy, a result of the unhappy consciousness of modernity. Not only is immediacy no longer available to us because of complexity and modernity, Derrida holds that it never really existed at all. His Specters of Marx' underlines Derrida's refusal to question a globalized techno-reality and the "democracy" it requires. Disembodiment and representation are the facts of life; we have no choice but to submit.

Indeed, a visitor from another planet might readily conclude that representation is all there is on earth today. Mediation is steadily burying simple directness. The linearization of symbols as language prefigured a triumphing technology, and a world built of images is now a dominant fact. More and more, the commodity is the same as the sign, in a society dedicated, above all, to consuming. This is the real status of symbolic "meaning" which rules by the principle of equivalenceunlike a gift, which is given without expectation of an equivalent return. Symbolic culture swallows and defines the landscape; no part of it is distinct from the underlying dis-embodying movement that is overtaking what is left of presence. Commodification and aestheticization of the life-world proceed hand in hand. Consuming and ineffective, stylistic gestures prevail.

Instead of being able to "return to the things themselves" a la Husserl, the channeled current of technology carries us further from them. Technology is the shock-troop of modernity, as Paul Piccone put it", and on technoculture's horizon the object simply fades out.

Postmodernism functions affirmatively for this advance, complementing its negative role of enforcing a ban on non-symbolic being. Rus.h.i.+ng out to embrace the bleakness of techno-cultural existence, postmodern thinkers prepare and support its continuing success. Gregory Ulmer's Applied Grammatology celebrates the key Derridean notion of its t.i.tle as facilitating new "technologies" of writing that are consciously allied with progress. According to Ulmer, grammatology makes possible a "new organization of cultural studies" that is responsive to the prevailing "era of communications technology."" Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology by George Landow" makes perfectly clear, beginning with its t.i.tle, the subservience of postmodern doctrine to technoculture.

Of course, it is division of labor that drives the growing complexity and all it brings in its wake. From the earliest erosion of human connectedness, immediacy, autonomy, and equality, an ever intensifying division of labor has driven industrial technics as well as social inequality. The fragmentation of experience advances into all sectors of human life by means of this foundational social inst.i.tution. Heidegger remained fundamentally ambivalent concerning the essence of technology because he refused to ground his thought in anthropological and historical reality. While recognizing the progressive domination of everything by unfolding technology, he also decided, characteristically, that "human activity can never directly counter this danger." 14 Thanks to the postmodern know-nothingism and failure of nerve, reality turns out to be not so bad after all. There's nothing one can do about it anyway; Heidegger himself said so. Ellen Mortensen speaks for the general accommodation: "My inclination is to accept the fundamental indeterminacy attached to technology, and to be open to the fact that the way of revealing that technology seems to govern today might possibly change as a result of future radical changes in technology."15 Could anything be more comforting to the ruling order and its direction?

Postmodernism is predicated on the thesis that the all-enveloping symbolic atmosphere, foundationless and inescapable, is made up of s.h.i.+fting, indeterminate signifiers that can never establish firm meaning. It is in this sense that Timothy Lenoir defends the fusing of life and machine while rebuking critics of high-tech dehumanization: "I wonder where one might locate the moral high ground in order to fas.h.i.+on such a critical framework?"" The reigning cultural ethos has explicitly denied the possibility of such ground or stable locus of meaning and value. Criticism is disarmed.

This sensibility, and its intended result, are further along than most people realize. Worth quoting at length, as one example, is Kathleen Woodward's non-atypical postmodern take on the future of human feelings in reference to "the process of technocultural feedback loops generating emotional growth."

The emergence of intersubjectivity between the humanworld and the technological world (represented by replicants and nonhuman cyborgs) results in a form of intelligenceemotional intelligence that is not only resourceful in a mult.i.tude of ways but is also deeply benevolent.... What is ultimately represented, then, is a system of distributed emotional intelligence where the human mindbody has profoundly meaningful ties to the cyberworld, feelings that are reciprocated.''

Jacquere Roseanne Stone looks "forward eagerly to continuing this high adventure" with technology "as we inexorably become creatures that we cannot even now imagine," celebrating such joys "at the dawn of the virtual age,"etc. '8 What is inexorable, like our basic entrapment in an ever-greater mediation, might as well be rejoiced in, apparently.

But it is obvious that some find all this offensive, even shocking, if this profoundly unhealthy society hasn't succeeded yet in rendering us immune to further shock. Mort, May and Williams," for instance, discuss "telemedicine", by which the human touch is completely removed from so-called healing. They are aware that the soon-to-be virtual clinic must be integrated into the larger socio-technological ensemble, and that confidence in this and project is essential. Their doubts about the latter are manifest.

It isn't as if there are no choices. After all, choice is mandatory in the consumer society, just as it is with deconstruction, where the supposedly fluid open-endedness of things requires multiple, continually revised interpretations. But the choices, so defined, are equally inconsequential in either (closely related) domain. The sickness of modernity will not be cured by more doses of modernity.

Behind the baffling failures of our hollow, distancing life arrangements stands the overall failure of complexity itself, considered from whatever angle one chooses. A deeo s.h.i.+ft must arise, as ever, from doubt and need. What grows unchecked is a vista that can only give rise to doubt because it fails to satisfy a single authentic need.

What need could be greater than our hunger for presence, for that quality that is so primary, whose absence is the measure of our impoverishment? Adorno dismissed as busywork any philosophy that doesn't risk total failure.' It's no wonder that many have concluded that the "end of philosophy" has been reached, when avoidance of the obvious remains the rule-though everything is at stake!

Symbolic culture has always been a mediated or virtual reality, long before what we call "media" existed. With hypertext, hypermedia, and the like, in the era of hypercomplexity, it is easier now to see what the destination of culture has been all along. Not from our beginning, but from its beginning. As the rate of completion of technification accelerates, so does the diet of fantasy and denial grow in importance, consumed by a jaded and enervated humanity.

Who can deny that instead of more retreat from reality, we need a life-centered re-embodiment, a return to groundedness, presence, the face-to-face? The promise of communication is imbued with that dimension. We say we're "in touch with," "in contact with" another. That is, we'd like to be, while directness continues to be systematically drained from even our closest relations.h.i.+ps.

Novalis called philosophy a kind of homesickness, reminding us of the lost unity of the world. "Nature is always for us as at the first day," said the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty=', offering an inspiring perspective. An understanding of origins, so categorically ruled out by postmodernists, may be among the necessary antidotes to an otherwise terminal condition.

For several decades now, pessimism has been the norm for supposedly critical thinking. Imagine the difference if the inevitability of technological civilization were no longer a given.

The Modern Anti-World.

There now exists only one civilization, a single global domestication machine. Modernity's continuing efforts to disenchant and instru- mentalize the non-cultural natural world have produced a reality in which there is virtually nothing left outside the system. This trajectory was already visible by the time of the first urbanites. Since those Neolithic times we have moved ever closer to the complete de-realization of nature, culminating in a state of world emergency today. Approaching ruin is the commonplace vista, our obvious non-future.

It's hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are valid. Modernity is inherently globalizing, ma.s.sifying, standardizing. The self-evident conclusion that an indefinite expansion of productive forces will be fatal deals the final blow to belief in progress. As China's industrialization efforts go into hyper-drive, we have another graphic case in point.

Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on technology, civilization's material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation. One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment of self, society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.

A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.

Influence over even the smallest event or circ.u.mstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier preeminence of place, increasingly replaced bywhat Pico Ayer calls "airport culture"-rootless, urban, h.o.m.ogenized. Modernity finds its original basis in colonialism, just as civilization itself is founded on domination-at an ever more basic level. Some would like to forget this pivotal element of conquest, or else "transcend" it, as in Enrique Dussel's facile "new trans-modernity" pseudo-resolution (The Invention of the Americas, 1995). Scott Lash employs somewhat similar sleight-of-hand in AnotherModernity:ADifferentRationality (1999), a feeble nonsense t.i.tle given his affirmation of the world of technoculture. One more tortuous failure isAlternativeModernity (1995), in which Andrew Feenberg sagely observes that "technology is not a particular value one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end." The triumphant world of technicized civilization-known to us as modernization, globalization, or capitalism-has nothing to fear from such empty evasiveness.

Paradoxically, most contemporary works of social a.n.a.lysis provide grounds for an indictment of the modern world, yet fail to confront the consequences of the context they develop. David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensuous (1995), for example, provides a very critical overview of the roots of the anti-life totality, only to conclude on an absurd note. Ducking the logical conclusion of his entire book (which should be a call to oppose the horrific contours of techno-civilization), Abrams decides that this movement toward the abyss is, after all, earth-based and "organic." Thus "sooner or later [it] must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land." An astoundingly irresponsible way to conclude his a.n.a.lysis.

Richard Stivers has studied the dominant contemporary ethos of loneliness, boredom, mental illness, etc., especially in his Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of Technological Society (1998). But this work fizzles out into quietism, just as his critique in Technology as Magic ends with a similar avoidance: "the struggle is not against technology, which is a simplistic understanding of the problem, but against a technological system that is now our life-milieu."

The Enigma of Health (1996) by Hans Georg Gadamer advises us to bring "the achievements of modern society, with all of its automated, bureaucratic and technological apparatus, back into the service of that fundamental rhythm which sustains the proper order of bodily life". Nine pages earlier, Gadamer observes that it is precisely this apparatus of objectification that produces our "violent estrangement from ourselves."

The list of examples could fill a small library-and the horror show goes on. One datum among thousands is this society's staggering level of dependence on drug technology. Work, sleep, recreation, non-anxiety/depression, s.e.xual function, sports performance-what is exempt? Anti-depressant use among preschoolers-preschoolers-is surging, for example (New York Times, April 2, 2004).

Aside from the double-talk of countless semi-critical "theorists", however, is the simple weight of unapologetic inertia: the countless voices who counsel that modernity is simply inescapable and we should desist from questioning it. It's clear that there is no escaping modernization anywhere in the world, they say, and that is unalterable. Such fatalism is well captured by the t.i.tle of Michel Dertourzos' What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (1997).

Small wonder that nostalgia is so prevalent, that pa.s.sionate yearning for all that has been stripped from our lives. Ubiquitous loss mounts, along with protest against our uprootedness, and calls for a return home. As ever, partisans of deepening domestication tell us to abandon our desires and grow up. Norman Jacobson ("Escape from Alienation: Challenges to the Nation-State," Representations 84: 2004) warns that nostalgia becomes dangerous, a hazard to the State, if it leaves the world of art or legend. This craven leftist counsels "realism" not fantasies: "Learning to live with alienation is the equivalent in the political sphere of the relinquishment of the security blanket of our infancy."

Civilization, as Freud knew, must be defended against the individual; all of its inst.i.tutions are part of that defense.

But how do we get out of here-off this death s.h.i.+p? Nostalgia alone is hardly adequate to the project of emanc.i.p.ation. The biggest obstacle to taking the first step is as obvious as it is profound. If understanding comes first, it should be clear that one cannot accept the totality and also formulate an authentic critique and a qualitatively different vision of that totality. This fundamental inconsistency results in the glaring incoherence of some of the works cited above.

I return to Walter Benjamin's striking allegory of the meaning of modernity: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1940) There was a time when this storm was not raging, when nature was not an adversary to be conquered and tamed into everything that is barren and ersatz. But we've been traveling at increasing speed, with rising gusts of progress at our backs, to even further disenchantment, whose impoverished totality now severely imperils both life and health.

Systematic complexity fragments, colonizes, debases daily life. Division of labor, its motor, diminishes humanness in its very depths, dis-abling and pacifying us. This de-skilling specialization, which gives us the illusion of competence, is a key, enabling predicate of domestication.

Before domestication, Ernest Gellner (Sword, Plow and Book, 1989) noted, "there simply was no possibility of a growth in scale and in complexity of the division of labour and social differentiation." Of course, there is still an enforced consensus that a "regression" from civilization would entail too high a cost-bolstered by fict.i.tious scary scenarios, most of them resembling nothing so much as the current products of modernity.

People have begun to interrogate modernity. Already a specter is haunting its now crumbling facade. In the 198os, Jurgen Habermas feared that the "ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of premodernity," had already attained some popularity. A great tide of such thinking seems all but inevitable, and is beginning to resonate in popular films, novels, music, zines, TV shows, etc.

And it is also a sad fact that acc.u.mulated damage has caused a widespread loss of optimism and hope. Refusal to break with the total- itycrowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Onlyvisions completely undefined by the current reality const.i.tute our first steps to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the enemy's terms. (This position may appear extreme; 19th century abolitionism also appeared extreme when its adherents declared that only an end to slavery was acceptable, and that reforms were pro-slavery.) Marx understood modern society as a state of "permanent revolution," in perpetual, innovating movement. Postmodernity brings more of the same, as accelerating change renders everything human (such as our closest relations.h.i.+ps) frail and undone. The reality of this motion and fluidity has been raised to a virtue by postmodern thinkers, who celebrate undecidability as a universal condition. All is in flux, and context-free; every image or viewpoint is as ephemeral and as valid as any other.

This outlook is the postmodern totality, the position from which postmodernists condemn all other viewpoints. Postmodernism's historic ground is unknown to itself, because of a founding aversion to overviews and totalities. Unaware of Kaczynski's central idea (Industrial Society and Its Future, 1996) that meaning and freedom are progressively banished by modern technological society, postmodernists would be equally uninterested in the fact that Max Weber wrote the same thing almost a century before. Or that the movement of society, so described, is the historical truth of what postmodernists a.n.a.lyze so abstractly, as if it were a novelty they alone (partially) understand.

Shrinking from any grasp of the logic of the system as a whole, via a host of forbidden areas of thought, the anti-totality stance of these embarra.s.sing frauds is ridiculed by a reality that is more totalized and global than ever. The surrender of the postmodernists is an exact reflection of feelings of helplessness that pervade the culture. Ethical indifference and aesthetic self-absorption join hands with moral paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resistance. It is no surprise that a non-Westerner such as Ziauddin Sardan (Postmodernism and the Other, 1998) judges that postmodernism "preserves-indeed enhances-all the cla.s.sical and modern structures of oppression and domination."

This prevailing fas.h.i.+on of culture may not enjoy much more of a shelf life. It is, after all, only the latest retail offering in the marketplace of representation. By its very nature, symbolic culture generates distance and mediation, supposedly inescapable burdens of the human condition. The self has always only been a trick of language, says Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than the modes through which language autonomously pa.s.ses, Derrida informs us.

The outcome of the imperialism of the symbolic is the sad commonplace that human embodiment plays no essential role in the functions of mind or reason. Conversely, it's vital to rule out the possibility that things have ever been different. Postmodernism resolutely bans the subject of origins, the notion that we were not always defined and reified by symbolic culture. Computer simulation is the latest advance in representation, its disembodied power fantasies exactly paralleling modernity's central essence.

The postmodernist stance refuses to admit stark reality, with discernible roots and essential dynamics. Benjamin's "storm" of progress is pressing forward on all fronts. Endless aesthetic-textual evasions amount to rank cowardice. Thomas Lamarre serves up a typical postmodern apologetic on the subject: "Modernity appears as a process or rupture and reinscription; alternative modernities entail an opening of otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or reinscribing it. It is as if modernity itself is deconstruction." (Impacts ofModernities, 2004).

Except that it isn't, as if anyone needed to point that out. Alas, deconstruction and detotalization have nothing in common. Deconstruction plays its role in keeping the whole system going, which is a real catastrophe, the actual, ongoing one.

The era of virtual communication coincides with the postmodern abdication, an age of enfeebled symbolic culture. Weakened and cheapened connectivity finds its a.n.a.logue in the fetis.h.i.+zation of ever-s.h.i.+fting, debased textual "meaning." Swallowed in an environment that is more and more one immense aggregate of symbols, deconstruction embraces this prison and declares it to be the only possible world. But the depreciation of the symbolic, including illiteracy and a cynicism about narrative in general, may lead in the direction of bringing the whole civilizational project into question. Civilization's failure at this most fundamental level is becoming as clear as its deadly and multiplying personal, social, and environmental effects.

"Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists," predicted Georges Bataille. Language and the symbolic are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, according to Derrida and the rest. Yet we see at the same time an ever-diminis.h.i.+ng vista of understanding. The seeming paradox of an engulfing dimension of representation and a shrinking amount of meaning finally causes the former to become susceptible-first to doubt, then to subversion.

Husserl tried to establish an approach to meaning based on respecting experience/ phenomena just as it is delivered to us, before it is re-presented by the logic of symbolism. Small surprise that this effort has been a central target of postmodernists, who have understood the need to extirpate such avision. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this opposition succinctly, decreeing that "We have no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that holds man [sic] in its bosom" (The Birth to Presence, 1993). How desperately do those who collaborate with the reigning nightmare resist the fact that during the two million years before civilization, this earth was precisely a place that did not abandon us and did hold us to its bosom.

Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking. Empty, h.o.m.ogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The "time" of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight. Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-f& is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence.

It is language that speaks, in Heidegger's phrase. But was it always so? This world is over-full of images, simulations-a result of choices that may seem irreversible. A species has, in a few thousand years, destroyed community and created a ruin. A ruin called culture. The bonds of closeness to the earth and to each other-outside of domestication, cities, war, etc.-have been sundered, but can they not heal?

Under the sign of a unitary civilization, the possibly fatal onslaught against anything alive and distinctive has been fully unleashed for all to see. Globalization has in fact only intensified what was underway well before modernity. The tirelessly systematized colonization and uniformity, first set in motion by the decision to control and tame, now has enemies who see it for what it is and for the ending it will surely bring, unless it is defeated. The choice at the beginning of historywas, as now, that of presence versus representation.

Gadamer describes medicine as, at base, the restoration of what belongs to nature. Healing as removing whatever works against life's wonderful capacity to renew itself. The spirit of anarchy, I believe, is similar. Remove what blocks our way and it's all there, waiting for us.

Globalization and its.

Ap0I091StS: AN ABOLITIONIST PERSPECTIVE.