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Title: Golem in the Catacombs Author: Alex Gorrion Date: January 12, 2014 Language: en Topics: technology, alienation, social-isolation, apparatus, class, power, review, The Anvil Review Source: The Anvil Review
“The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky,
the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could
understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit
it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder
still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the
eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?”
John Banville, Birchwood
It's getting colder here. People shuffle by in hats and scarves.
Fur-lined hoods appear in improbable quantities. Licensed vendors,
unpacked in pleasant arrays, marshalled forth by the city in its brave
quest to claim a new pedestrian shopping zone, are the first and only
line of battle against the cold. They rub mittens and hunch puffy
jackets against it, smile as only ascendant shopkeepers can, and roast
chestnuts, slice baked goods, fetch glittery necklaces from crowded
displays, and conquer what would have been a winterbarren street.
I used to be a partisan of winter, back when the seasons still promised
an untamed difference. Now I too huddle against it, my fire gone,
protected by an old leather jacket I found, waiting in just the right
size, in a freestore near here. My friends made jokes about it, a
throwback to the '80s, evidently. When their jokes continued from time
to time, I gathered they were actually made uncomfortable by my wearing
of the jacket and its extinguished aesthetic.
The commodity demands its homage, even from those who must steal it. And
my friends, anticapitalists to a one, go about in those sporty jackets
made from materials far more polysyllabic than leather. Again the old
question. Is it better to blend in, or to signal our defiance of the
national religion? For myself, I just can't turn down a jacket that
still works, and my brain won't accept that the dull brown thing
actually draws attention from the citizens sunk in layers of equally
mundane garb, hiding away from temperatures that still have not passed
freezing.
They are a frigid people, with few defenses against even a lackluster
winter. Nonetheless, this year there are fewer gloves in evidence. More
people are keeping their fingers free to tap on little screens, their
faces awash in blue glow, as they scuttle blindly down the streets.
The new device is finally triumphing in this economically holdout
nation. Could anyone ever have doubted it? What sorts of homogenization
is something so flimsy as “culture” able to hold back? This is the
difference between a hula hoop and an iPhone. One is a product that may
catch on or not. The other is an army that must be quartered.
The entire citizenry has revealed their vapidity. They are mere bodies
stripped of all their limbs and plugged into a vast matrix of
domination, perpetually vacated to serve as conduit for the flux of
power. Lost creatures who fumble around in smug devices looking for love
or distraction. They are children who have never learned to read maps or
ask for directions, children whose intimate haunts that were never
trusted to paper have now been thoroughly mapped by the devices they
carry with them. The impoverished oral culture that remains has been
forced through this new apparatus. There is no more face-to-face
communication; all of it is legible now to the authorities.
The cellphone that shares my room sometimes like an evil stranger
heralds the arrival of a new message with a cheerful arrangement of
beeps. After a time I pick it up, already imagining the number of the
one person I wish most to hear from. But there are only five digits on
the screen. An automatic message from the phone company, wishing me a
happy birthday—did I put down this day, of all days, as my birthday?—and
offering me a present, a free gift, which I only have to claim by
logging on to their website. I unplug the broken thing and, batteryless,
it dies. Every device should be equally crippled. I turn back to the
article I am writing.
In a parallel universe where justice reigns, all those cretins who
claimed the internet would bring us closer together and Twitter would
make the revolution are being lined up against the wall in an old park
and shot. Not out of vindictiveness or vengeance. The purpose of the
executions is educational.
“Don't worry,” each of the condemned is told as blindfolds are affixed.
“It's all okay: we'll update your Facebook.”
But parallel lines never intersect, and as ours progresses, the parks
and squares empty out. Only wraiths pass by, absent to themselves,
linked in a psychic death pact to another wraith staring somewhere at
the same glowing screen. Only a few are still resentfully here,
temporarily anchored by domesticated dogs for whom no application yet
exists to take on walks. But even the housepets appear more neurotic as
they pull against a leash that connects only to dead weight. They stare
frantically at nothing, like inmates too long interned.
I think of a resolution to make on New Years. From now on, whenever I
encounter a cyborg, I will speak only to the device, the brain, and
ignore the flesh-head that still pretends to be in charge. Someone
should start killing cyborgs, smashing the devices and liberating the
golem they hold in thrall.
A year ago a wave of graffiti appeared in a park near my house. It was
the first sign of life to have appeared there in some time. The
occasion, I gathered, was the premature death of a member of a circle of
young people who sometimes gathered on the stairs. “Alex,” the inked
etchings inscribed, “We will remember you.” “Alex, brother, we won't
forget.” “Alex, you were my first love.” The wall stood almost always
alone. The kids I associated with it appeared less and less often. Had I
only dreamt them? The graffiti, as such, seemed like its own tribe. When
the wall was washed clean, the writing appeared again, as if by magic.
Now there is nothing there. I wonder if I am the only one who remembers
that unknown boy. What has become of his friends?
And what superb instinct leads us to scratch away at the indelible
façade of our world right at that moment when one of us snuffs out their
meaningless life? As if the excess of agony standing like stale water
that no apparatus yet designed can wash away pushes us Borf-like to
attempt the impermissible, the inscription of our experiences in the
metallic flanks of our prison. In moments like these it seems that
everyone is aware that amnesia is included in the bylaws of Order; and
therefore, to not forget, we must break the law. The only walls we are
allowed to transform are on Facebook, mapping for the enemy.
Today, true grieving demands we resort to graffiti. In a time not far
off—already arrived in some parts—it will demand terrorism.
Such a tragedy that suicide loses its enchantment with age. Precisely as
we have nothing left to lose, we lose the resolve to go out with dignity
in that ultimate, irrecuperable subversion. As though we were
genetically programmed to weaken just in those years when we can claim
empirical proof that, no, things will not get better, it seems the onset
of a hormonal listlessness, the liquification of a certain moral fiber
running through our core, enlists us to plod along with the whole of our
society, look away or grimace as we might, but ever onwards, in
furtherance of whatever harebrained course the species has set.
The political consequences of this resulting lack of elderly suicide
bombers are immense. Social stability may lay thanks for its prosperity
on the doorstep of that biological cowardice with which failures cling
to failure and rebels, at their very best, cling to those same gestures
that have long since let them down.
Even the engineers of each new apparatus are feeling lonely. How many
start-up geeks marketing the latest Twitter spin-off or networking app
sincerely believe that their invention might bring people closer?
Convince a prisoner that freedom is made of walls, and they will build
new cells all on their own. The guards have put down their guns but they
can't hand out bricks fast enough. The general population scouts out the
new galleries and wings. Is this what we've been looking for?
We often tell of Baron Hausmann of Paris, the rightwing architect who
redesigned the city in time for the Commune, widening avenues and
intersections, enclosing common spaces, to take the defensive advantage
away from a population in revolt and allow an invading army easy access,
changing the very terrain to favor a new kind of war.
We should speak more of Ildefons CerdĂ , the utopian socialist architect
who redesigned Barcelona in the 1860s. He sought to use architecture to
bring about social justice and defuse class conflict by bringing rich
and poor together in harmony. The modifications he left behind were
nearly the same as those that had been imposed on Paris.
This is not new, but it is getting more common. Nowadays, hip CEOs
debate whether technology will overcome alienation and powerlessness or
whether it is increasingly totalitarian. One pole in this debate labors
all the faster to develop new technologies, hoping to find the one that
will really save us, and the other promotes conscious capitalism and
donates profits to NGOs.
Those who do not take sides in the social war and commit themselves to a
path of negation maintain an affective allegiance to power, and the only
way for them to reconcile this allegiance with whatever residual
feelings of being human still trouble them in their new cyborg
physiology is to decorate these allegiances, to pour even more affective
attention into the “improvement” of the rites of power. The fact that
what we are seeing is not an initiative of the traditional ruling class
is evident in the selection of rites for decoration. Elections, military
parades, leader cults, and similar processes are not the objects of
adoration. In fact, the enthusiastic campaigns of civic improvement have
tended to destabilize, delegitimize, or eclipse the rites that have
traditionally been predominant in the sanctification of power. Neither
have the initiatives come from the upper strata of the owning class; on
the contrary, the most influential production to result in the
decoration and intensification of the affective allegiances that tie
people to power has been initiated by individuals from the
computer-literate section of what would be defined as the working class,
who in their astronomic ascent have founded companies that upset the
preexisting capitalist hierarchy and now rank among the largest.
A large part of what economists might see as growth in the last few
decades is an exponential explosion in the frenetically doomed activity
of alienated people constructing new apparatuses to mediate alienation,
with the unintended but inevitable consequence of spreading it to new
heights and moments of life.
State planners and capitalists, while not the initiators of what has
become an October 12, a Columbus-moment, in the field of social control,
have responded in perfect form; the former by pursuing an aggressive
institutional advance into the network of new and momentarily
underregulated apparatuses that have been formed, and by integrating new
technics into a revamped Cold War security apparatus; the latter by
handing out bricks on low-interest loan, making sure that the supply
never runs low and that no good deed goes unexploited.
Yet one has the feeling that they are not merely profiting off a
plebeian circus, that even the most powerful engineers are now moved by
a quest to mediate alienation. As a historical rule, up until now it
seems clear that no matter how universal alienation has been, the
exercise of power acted as a drug to allow a certain class of people to
find fulfillment in the midst of misery. This affective marker of the
ruling class as distinct holders of power is what made Foucault's theory
of the immanence and diffusion of power an overstated argument and, if
our present musings have set their teeth to marrow and not air, an
argument that was ahead of its time.
Increasingly, a new measure of class (post-defeat class, as ladder and
not as warfare) is how fully one can organize their lives in the space
of the new virtual apparatuses.
Could it be that the charm of winning the class war has worn out? A
power-holder must hold it against someone. Once the class war is won is
the moment our prison guard realizes that he too is in a prison. He is
no longer a heroic protagonist wielding his power against the savage
masses, but a conduit through which power moves to maintain the good
order of the apparatus. The emergency is past. Power no longer needs his
creativity and dedication as protagonist to triumph. Put another way,
power has risen out of the class of protagonists who heroically
generated and organized it so as to organize itself at a higher level.
Today, affective dedication and creativity are required of all those
desolate souls who must inhabit a prison, regardless of their level of
relative privilege.
The forerunner of this dynamic, now repeated at a greater intensity, is
the patriarchal system of bribery that allowed any expendable
proletarian or peasant man to play at being tyrant, and taste a small
dose of the drug that made misery enjoyable.
Games of power-against played out at a continental scale color the early
history of the State. Power-as-drug constituted an affective wage that
roped people in to building State power. However, power-fiending
protagonists do not always make decisions in the interests of stability
or accumulation. The new apparatuses, organized on a logic of
power-as-flux, mark a tighter arrangement whereby people are conduits of
power and they pay to be played. They dedicate their affective energies
to the improvement of their prison, independent of any wages, because to
not do so would be spiritual suicide. While capitalism has always relied
on unwaged labor, until now that labor has been provided by patriarchy
or colonialism. In the Wikipedia age, the voluntary character of unwaged
production is largely different.
The new apparatuses of social networking also begin to quantify informal
power (the very informal power that has always held primary importance,
even and especially in the institutions of formal power, which could not
work without it) in “likes”, “friends”, and “followers”. But this
version of informal power is not the kind created by protagonists, it is
the kind produced by a mill wheel set spinning by a hundred chained
bodies each chasing after their own loneliness.
There are some who attempt to pirate power at the level of property,
using unregulated spaces in the new apparatuses to steal and share the
digital commodities that make up such a large part of the global
economy. But alienation extends so far beyond property, they can only
hope to be privateers. The free circulation of the product they have
liberated brings no benefit to the major concentrations of capital,
whose spokespersons tell of tremendous economic losses. Surely, such
crimes will not go unpunished, and in the future, prevented, as the
State cannot abide unregulated space. But at a level much more dear to
the world-machine than that of paltry capital accumulation, these
would-be pirates are doing important work, thus they are allowed a
certain license (though it is a license the most powerful nations will
not recognize, just as the privateers were legally commissioned
criminals in a polyarchic global system).
The service they render is to maintain and even expand the project of
social control. They are the next chapter in the dilemma of the workers
who occupy their factory and keep on producing. To name a common
example, they have liberated music—what could be more beautiful? But
this is not a pirate cassette, taped off the radio and shared among
friends on a boombox in the park. This is a digital file that will be
added to an inhumanly extensive library, linked in to the web for the
collection of metadata, and fed directly into the ears of the golem, who
will continue to slide like oil over the surface of the muted landscape,
blind and limbless, doing whatever it takes to avoid wondering how they
got there.
Such music is the pinnacle of our civilization. What beautiful sounds we
invent, to play while the ship sinks, the weight of its spite bringing
the whole sea down with it.
A gust of tepid wind blows past me. I have finished my circle and found
nothing to keep me. An alcoholic sits on a bench, howling at the empty
streets. Young people drift by, ears plugged to the world, bobbing their
heads to unheard tunes. A dog barks. A motorcycle idles. When someone
passes close enough, I hear a faint, electric rendition of song.