Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange)

Can't move forward and you can't stand still

Hegel holds that history fulfills its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions. In the context of Covid the cunning of history is seen. Look today into heads of the American and weep. Speed year on year shapes daily life. Education also is adapted to Industrialism. Under the sign of the Pandemic cyber speed ruled. Virilio offers a genealogy in which civil society (originally the city) was actually twin-born with military society from pre-civilized “tumults” of all-against-all violence. He posits this in contradistinction to the model of trade as the basis for civilization. According to him, war has evolved from tactics (pre-martial violence), through strategy (control of space), to logistics (control of time). The global fruition of logistics is the “pure war” in which humanity is increasingly subject to a non-human technological agenda predicated on abstract, hyperreal conflict. 

Ellul discusses Technique. “Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.”

Giorgio Agamben in his 2021 essay “The will and the necessity”. The question of whether governments are consciously using the pandemic to declare a state of exception that strengthens their powers beyond all limits or whether they have no choice but the emergency is misplaced. What happens today, as in any decisive historical crisis, is that the two things are both true: the use of the state of exception as a stratagem and the impossibility of governing otherwise than through it coincide. The sovereign, while acting in an absolutely arbitrary way, is at the same time forced to make an incessant decision on the exception that ultimately defines its nature. The epoch we are living in is, that is, the one in which the illegitimacy of the powers that govern the earth appears in full light: since they have lost any possibility of configuring themselves in a recognizable symbolic order, they are obliged to suspend the law and the constitutional principles that might define it. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. 

This latter observation also recalls Walter Benjamin’s observation that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.” Salvation from death by vaccines is thought to be a technique akin to magic.  A materialism sans spirituality is shared by all ethnic groups evidently biased towards elite education favoring injections. I think privileging the domination of the Left Hemisphere culture we are socialized into.

As I move into my mid 60’s my public education looms large by my refusals. I was a fan of George Grosz before college and felt like him that a little yes and a big no was best. Years later I’m trapped with no Bitcoin and less money wanting to flee my old home of 36 years San Francisco. Escape to Erewhon in deep Southern California with beaches and breezes and warm nearly tropical water and Redwoods.

Berdyaev sees modern history as the testing of human liberty. Humanism rebels against medieval subjection in affirming man's self-confidence, but it ends in debasing him through severing his celestial ties and in seeing him as but a part of nature. The Renaissance rediscovered natural man and antiquity, witnessed the clash of pagan and Christian principles, and saw their partial reconciliation in the great symbolic art of the age. The Reformation affirmed man's freedom from ecclesiastical compulsion, but it debased man by denying his primal freedom before God.

The Enlightenment affirmed man's self-sufficient reason, but in denying any mystery it debased man's ability to know. The French Revolution affirmed man's ability to change history but ended in denying all human rights. Romanticism affirmed man's spiritual resources but denied his ultimate destiny. Industrialism affirmed man's liberation from nature but denied his integrity and dignity. Modern history by a fatal dialectic sees humanism paradoxically be coming inhumanism; the denial of God tending to the denial of man. Berdyaev sees the present as the beginning of a new barbarism the inhumanity of which is manifest in the total war system where human lives are regarded as mere means; in capitalism under which man is enslaved and oppressed by property; in collectivism where the organization becomes the end and man, the instrument; in a morality of bestialism which permits the use of man in any way to attain inhuman or anti-human ends; in cultural manifestations in literature, science, philosophy, and theology which interpret integral man in terms of a part; in politics with sham democracy's concern with only abstract, formal political freedom and the totalitarian's rejection of all freedom; in the dictator led masses in which all individuality is ruthlessly obliterated; in the intensification of racialism and nationalism which find the existential center in entities other than human personality; in the tyranny of Caesars who rule by appeal to instinct and emotion; and in a Christianity that largely conforms to the world.

This barbarism may lead on to the new Middle Ages which Berdyaev sees marked by the end of humanism, individualism, and formal liberalism; a simplified material culture; political universalism.; religious collectivism; and a social order of the syndicalist type. Berdyaev rejects the progressive and cyclical notions of history. Though Western civilization is at a crisis, he postulates the possibility of salvation through religious transfiguration. This will take place only as Christianity and creation are combined, i.e. as a dynamic, creative conception of the Church becomes actualized and incarnated in all areas of life. Man's ethical task is one of creativity as in contemplation he acquires the intuitive insight of genius and in self-sacrificing love he actualizes his inspiration. Death signifies that there is no eternity in time and that an endless temporal series is meaningless. Man's role in this situation is to forsake the creation of temporary, transitory, and corruptible goods and to devote himself to the creation of eternal, permanent, and immortal values.

I ain’t clear if he meant the Punks of his time.

To the readers of our New First Unexpected.

We alone was the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the world.

The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.

He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.

Who, trustingly, would turn his last love toward Balmont’s perfumed lechery? Is this the reflection of today’s virile soul?

Who, faint-heartedly, would fear tearing from warrior Bryusov’s black tuxedo the paper armor-plate? Or does the dawn of unknown beauties shine from it?

Wash your hands which have touched the filthy slime of the books written by the countless Leonid Andreyevs.

All those Maxim Gorkys, Krupins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.

From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance!...

We order that the poets’ rights be revered:

• To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).

• To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.

• To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches.

• To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.

And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of your “common sense” and “good taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word.

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