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Title: Age of Grief Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: postmodernity, psychological Source: Retrieved on April 22nd, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/age-of-grief.htm
A pervasive sense of loss and unease envelops us, a cultural sadness
that can justly be compared to the individual who suffers a personal
bereavement.
A hyper-technologized late capitalism is steadily effacing the living
texture of existence, as the world’s biggest die-off in 50 million years
proceeds apace: 50,000 plant and animal species disappear each year
(World Wildlife Fund, 1996).
Our grieving takes the form of postmodern exhaustion, with its wasting
diet of an anxious, ever-shifting relativism, and that attachment to
surface that fears connecting with the fact of staggering loss. The
fatal emptiness of ironized consumerism is marked by a loss of energy,
difficulty in concentrating, feelings of apathy, social withdrawal;
precisely those enumerated in the psychological literature of mourning.
The falsity of postmodernism consists in its denial of loss, the refusal
to mourn. Devoid of hope or vision for the future, the reigning
zeitgeist also cuts off, very explicitly, an understanding of what has
happened and why. There is a ban on thinking about origins, which is
companion to an insistence on the superficial, the fleeting, the
ungrounded.
Parallels between individual grief and a desolate, grieving common
sphere are often striking. Consider the following from therapist Kenneth
Doka (1989): “Disenfranchised grief can be defined as the grief that
persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be
openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.” Denial on
an individual level provides an inescapable metaphor for denial at
large; personal denial, so often thoroughly understandable, introduces
the question of refusal to come to grips with the crisis occurring at
every level.
Ushering in the millennium are voices whose trademark is opposition to
narrative itself, escape from any kind of closure. The modernist project
at least made room for the apocalyptic; now we are expected to hover
forever in a world of surfaces and simulation that ensure the “erasure”
of the real world and the dispersal of both the self and the social.
Baudrillard is of course emblematic of the “end of the end,” based on
his prefigured “extermination of meaning.”
We may turn again to the psychological literature for apt description.
Deutsch (1937) examined the absence of expressions of grief that occur
following some bereavements and considered this a defensive attempt of
the ego to preserve itself in the face of overwhelming anxiety. Fenichel
(1945) observed that grief is at first experienced only in very small
doses; if it were released full-strength, the subject would feel
overwhelming despair. Similarly, Grimspoon (1964) noted that “people
cannot risk being overwhelmed by the anxiety which might accompany a
full cognitive and affective grasp of the present world situation and
its implications for the future.”
With these counsels and cautions in mind, it is nonetheless obvious that
loss must be faced. All the more so in the realm of social existence,
where in distinction to, say, the death of a loved one, a crisis of
monumental proportions might be turned toward a transformative solution,
if no longer denied. Repression, most clearly and presently practised
via postmodern fragmentation and superficiality. does not extinguish the
problem. “The repressed,” according to Bollas (1995) “signifies the
preserved: hidden away in the organized tensions of the unconscious,
wishes and their memories are ceaselessly struggling to find some way
into gratification in the present — desire refutes annihilation.”
Grief is the thwarting and deadening of desire and very much resembles
depression; in fact, many depressions are precipitated by losses
(Klerman, 1981). Both grief and depression may have anger at their root;
consider, for example, the cultural association of black with grief and
mourning and with anger, as in “black rage.”
Traditionally, grief has been seen as giving rise to cancer. A
contemporary variation on this thesis is Norman Mailer’s notion that
cancer is the unhealthiness of a deranged society, turned inward,
bridging the personal and public spheres. Again, a likely connection
among grief, depression, and anger — and testimony, I think, to massive
repression. Signs abound concerning weakening immune defenses; along
with increasing material toxins, there seems to be a rising level of
grief and its concomitants. When meaning and desire are too painful, too
unpromising to admit or pursue, the accumulating results only add to the
catastrophe now unfolding.
To look at narcissism, today’s bellwether profile of character, is to
see suffering as an ensemble of more and more closely related aspects.
Lasch (1979) wrote of such characteristic traits of the narcissistic
personality as an inability to feel, protective shallowness, increased
repressed hostility, and a sense of unreality and emptiness. Thus,
narcissism too could be subsumed under the heading of grief, and the
larger suggestion arises with perhaps greater force: there is something
profoundly wrong, something at the heart of all this sorrow, however
much it is commonly labelled under various separate categories.
In a 1917 exploration, “Mourning and Melancholia,” a puzzled Freud asked
why the memory of “each single one of the memories and hopes” that is
connected to the lost loved one “should be so extraordinarily painful.”
But tears of grief, it is said, are at base tears for oneself. The
intense sorrow at a personal loss, tragic and difficult as it most
certainly is, may be in some way also a vulnerability to sorrow over a
more general, trans-species loss.
Walter Benjamin wrote his “Theses on History” a few months before his
premature death in 1940 at a sealed frontier that prevented escape from
the Nazis. Breaking the constraints of marxism and literariness,
Benjamin achieved a high point of critical thinking. He saw that
civilization, from its origin, is that storm evacuating Eden, saw that
progress is an single, ongoing catastrophe.
Alienation and anguish were once largely, if not entirely, unknown.
Today the rate of serious depression, for example, doubles roughly every
ten years in the developed nations (Wright, 1995).
As Peter Homans (1984) put it very ably, “Mourning does not destroy the
past — it reopens relations with it and with the communities of the
past.” Authentic grieving poses the opportunity to understand what has
been lost and why, also to demand the recovery of an innocent state of
being, wherein needless loss is banished.