How Curses Work 3.5: Mythoimperialismo

Imperialism lies not just in the physical violence of invasion, domination, exploitation and subjugation, but also in the cultural violence of the appropriation and representation of the subjugated.

This is how exploitation and domination always works.  Patriarchy's domination of women is expressed in the marginalization, infantilization and suffocating sexualization of the female image in culture, the relentless portrayal of the woman as secondary, as an adjunct, as a commodity, as a servant or helpmate, as a source of male pleasure and satisfaction.  So the violence of imperialism is also expressed in the representation of the subjugated peoples as inferior and/or dangerous, by the plundering of their stories, histories, images, ideas, practices, customs, languages, discourses, art, architecture, etc., and their transformation into aspects of the dominant culture of the imperialist.

The subject culture is usually thus shown to be inherently deserving of domination, inherently savage, childlike, irrational and sinister.  If the subject culture is not demonized, it is usually infantilized, fanaticized (even their bravery is not real bravery but rather fanatical zeal from savages who do not feel pain or fear death the way we civilized people do), or shown as shambolic, idiotic and comic.  Needless to say, any resistance to imperial domination, or violent reaction against it, is generalised and used as evidence of the fanaticism and savagery of the dominated.

The imperialism of the modern age - beyond the brutal reality of bullets and plunder, and beyond the underlying system of states competing globally when their geopolitical priorities converge with those of their national concentrations of capital - is a system of myths.  It is as important to promulgate myths among the people of the imperial nation as it is to foist them on the victims.  One of the most enduring myths of imperialism is that the victims are to blame for their own plight.  This, together with a whole raft of inferiority complexes, is internalized by colonized people.  But it is also internalized by the colonizing nation.  This manifests itself in various versions.  There is, for instance, the 'it's for their own good' version, which says that the colonized benefit from colonialism, because colonialism brings them the benefits of 'civilization' (i.e. white Anglo-Saxon Christianity or modern secular liberal democracy, depending on which era the ideology comes from) to people who desperately need it.  This is closely related to the demonizing of the colonized.  The dual nature of the 'native' in all colonialist ideology is that they are "half-devil and half-child".

Our imperialism needs its ideological myths, just as much as the imperialism of the past... the really scary thing is that we keep coming up with the same myths about the same people... probably because we keep needing those myths as a cultural blindfold to stop ourselves seeing imperialism for what it is.

These are the merest banalities.

Grinding Engines

The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820 

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.  Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.

SF - with its concentration upon imagined future history, the elision of past technology with future technology, encounters with alien species further down the road of technological advancement than us and, last but not least, time travel - seems especially concerned with historical transformation, particularly with regards to technology.

Humans seem to have a tendency to imagine future disaster, or at least future decay, as a way of expressing our perception that our own world is winding down and wobbling on the brink.  This may be an inherent human feeling (like the seemingly inevitable perception that younger generations are worse than our own, which Plato was banging on about thousands of years ago).

We’re all time travellers, in a way. We all travel from ‘the old days’ into uncertain futures. This feeling has become especially acute for humans living in the modern era, when the forces of production unleashed by the capitalist mode have achieved things which previous generations would have considered to be impossible except through sorcery. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, as they attempted to express the way the emerging capitalist system was changing all human experience:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Capitalism began to revolutionise human life to an unprecedented degree, in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented speed, through the arrival of mass production, the factory system, technology, etc. The level and speed at which things changed massively increased.  Technology is a platform from which more sophisticated levels of technology may be attained, just as every scientific advance stems from earlier discoveries… moreover, since the economic basis of the technological revolution was industry, i.e. capitalism, the constant need to revolutionise the system was built into the system. Capitalists must always increase production, invest in new techniques and methods of production, pioneer new products, lower production costs, expand into new markets, etc. Capital breeds capital… and capital must be fed back into the process of expanding the productive forces. Every capitalist does this, for fear of being outstripped and put out of business.

Nevertheless, despite the dynamism of the system and the incredible material progress that it has brought, capitalism is inherently entropic.

Capitalism gave rise to the concept of entropy in the first place.   Thermodynamics (of which entropy is, as we know, the 'second law') - and with it much of modern physics -  was a scientific notion arrived at because of the Industrial Revolution, because the engineers wanted to know how their engines worked, why they didn't work, why they wound down, how they could be stopped from winding down and how they could be made to work better, stronger, faster, harder, longer. The connection continues: the application of entropy to Information Theory came from within the Rand Corporation.

Capitalism generates technological commodities which gradually run down, either in relative terms (i.e. becoming less efficient than new technology) or in absolute terms (i.e. in that they gradually get worn and used and tired) or in both.

This process generates wastage of technology. We’ve all been to the tip and seen those piles of old TVs, cookers, microwaves, freezers, etc. These are phenomena of modernity. I don’t mean that nothing decayed or fell apart in the Middle Ages or the Ancient world (of course it did), but the speed at which we produce more and more technology also increases the speed at which our world fills with technology that has become obsolete, decrepit, malfunctioning and abandoned.  The lives of humans in pre-modern, pre-technological societies are/were fundamentally dominated by endlessly repeating cycles embedded in nature.  The lives of humans in modern, technological society have many of the same cycles, but are increasingly dominated by the onward rush of change that comes with the continual revolutionizing of the productive forces.

Modernity has fundamentally reversed the old relationship humanity used to have with its creations, tools and machines.  For most of human history, the technological creations outlived the creators, both in general and often in particular.  The concept of the waterwheel would outlive the miller; often the particular wheel with which he worked would outlast him.  Now, humans outlive almost all their technological creations, except the most basic and/or monumental, like buildings... and even they have been changed, in both design practices and materials, almost beyond recognition.  The surgeon outlives successive generations of up-to-the-minute surgical tools, the web-designer outlives the most advanced hardware and software every year or so.  They even live to see the fundamental principles revolutionised.

The world that Plato died in was more or less the world he was born in, at least in terms of technology, and at least compared to us. To him, computers would have seemed like magic.  In 1980, Christopher H. Bidmead was able to write a script in which the Doctor expresses surprise that a computer retains information even when switched off. When the people who watched that episode as children (i.e. people like me) die… well, who knows?  Computers themselves may be obsolete by then.  But the undreamt-of advances of the future will leave the increasingly rickety state-of-the-art-circa-2012 standing... or more likely rotting.  Every new mp3 player or mobile phone or digital camera entails older models thrown in the scrap. DVD and Blu-Ray entailed piles of discarded old VHS tapes.  Every newly-purchased gadget means another of those little plastic-coated wire things that tie the brand new cables and leads into a neat bow.  Every DVD or CD bought means adding to the mountains of cellophane in which they come wrapped.

This is just the tip of the shitberg. From the earliest days of the industrial revolution – long before what we know as the green movement - people had been noticing the way that industrial technology generates wastage, pollution and rubbish as by-products. The railways were themselves the result of a staggering development of the productive forces of society, and their effects fed dialectically back into the system, contributing to yet more staggering development. But the combustion engine produced an enormous need to tear energy from the earth in the form of coal, it belched smoke, produced grease and dirt… and all its component parts were subject to all the wear and tear of shoe leather or flint hammers or any other tool. The gears and wheels and tracks wore away, stopped functioning properly, needed replacing, were torn out and discarded when superior innovations came along.

Time has always been, as Ovid put it, “the devourer of all things”, but it is only in the modern era – the era of capitalist industry and mass technology – that we humans have seen such impermeable and ubiquitous evidence of decay, wear and tear, abrasion, clutter and accelerating obsolescence. It surrounds us now. It demonstrates the impermanence of the things we make.  It lurks behind the latest innovations, waiting for their time to come.  And it is our creation.

It was one thing to see the natural world wither every autumn and regenerate itself every spring… these days we watch our own wondrous creations fall apart all around us, all the time, everywhere, no matter what we do. And unlike dead leaves, spent batteries don’t pass back into the soil from which they came. They sit on rubbish heaps. They engorge landfills. They float in canals. If we don’t trouble to do anything about it, they fill our drawers. And every time we open the drawer, they’re still there. Pooled in entropic uselessness. Production and consumption culminating in static malfunction. Recycling is an attempt to fend off industrial entropy as well as environmental devastation… but even the recycling collection vans belch out fumes; even the engines and crushers and pulpers and sievers of the recycling plant eventually run down.

That other great product of the modern age - world-scale, technological, industrial warfare - also creates entropy in massive doses.  All the machinery of modern war is industrially produced and industrially used.  The tanks, the machine guns, the planes, the bombs, the drones, the smart missiles, the body armour, the computer guidance systems, the depleted uranium-coated shells, the armour piercing rounds... they're all subject to the same pressures as all other industrial commodities.  Just like the mp3 players, the war machines are mass produced for profit.  Just like all machines, the military hardware wears down.  The newer model is designed and produced and sold.  A new missile system is bought by a government and all the old warheads are obsolete.  The unused weapons degrade and become useless.  The weapons that are used get bashed and battered, get sprayed with bullets or blown up (like the men who are sent to fire them).  Either that, or their gears grind and shread as the desert sand gets into their innards.  War is often said to lead to technological innovation, what with necessity being the mother of invention.  We might want to wonder how we define "necessity" in this context.

 And we might want to remember, alongside all the innovation, how much destruction war creates.  It leaves not only piles of expended and exhausted weapons, but cities reduced to rubble, the technological commodities that filled them turned to so many smithereens.  The wars that smash the wonders of the modern age to fragments are themselves products of the modern age.

The system that created the drive for hegemony, control of resources and markets which lead to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, also created the materiel which made the invasion possible... much of which was smashed, pulverised and incinerated in the process (to say nothing of the people who were turned to mincemeat or vapour).

But the loss of materiel simply refreshed the market for their products.  The debris piles grow, constantly refreshed by the engines of modernity.  In this sense, warfare is just the fastest, most extreme manifestation of the tendency inherent in capitalism towards the creation, circulation and consumption of commodities.

Modern warfare is industrial, technological... and it is like a frenzied, violent dramatization of the boom and slump cycle - the irresolvable and unreformable contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

This is where we loop back to the start and find the most basic reasons and ways in which capitalism is entropic.

It is the very necessity of accumulation to capitalists that causes crises.  In order to win in the market, the capitalist must invest in productivity.  He must produce his goods or services better, faster, cheaper.  He must drive down prices.  The primary way he can do this while continuing to turn a profit is to make workers more productive by investing in the machinery and techniques they use in the workplace.  But, in doing this, the capitalist changes the ratios.  The worker becomes more and more swamped by, integrated in and subordinate to machinery and systems.

The labour power of the worker is the source of exchange value, which appears in the market as price.  Human labour power is the only commodity that creates new value.  A worker spends only part of each working day creating the amount of value needed to perpetuate their own existence, the rest of the day is spent producing surplus value which goes to the capitalist.  The machinery used in the production process transmits some of the value embedded in it to the products, but cannot produce new value.  By itself, it can do nothing.  It must be set in motion and controlled by human labour power.  And even the value that the machinery does transmit (depreciating all the while) was itself created by the human labour power that created the machine.  When the capitalist pours surplus value back into the system, when he invests in machinery, he invests in that part of the production process that cannot create new value.  This is, ultimately, why prices drop: because the value (i.e. labour time) embedded in the product decreases.  This is all fine and dandy for the first capitalist to make the technical innovation, buy the better machine, automate more of the factory, develop the new and better software, etc... and, in the first instance, it helps him succeed against his competition.  But, over time, more capitalists invest in the same or better innovations, techniques and machines... they must, in order to accumulate in order to compete... and the level of profit across the entire system falls.

This is a tendency that asserts itself over time.  There are, as Marx readily allowed, countervailing tendencies than can retard or offset the falling rate of profit.  But, overall and over time, the tendency shows.  This analysis has been controversial but is readily and convincingly defencible.  Moreover, empirical data bears it out.  The current global recession was caused, at the most fundamental level, by just such a long term decline and stagnation of profitability.

Capitalism drives itself into chaos and crisis even as it accumulates.... because it accumulates.  It’s an inherent aspect of the system, to grind the engines until they burst apart.

Crisis leads to the wastage and destruction of excess capital.  Firms go bust.  Factories and offices close.  People are laid off.  Warehouses stagnate filled with unsold and unsaleable goods.  Town centres empty of going concerns.  Increasingly penurious ex-consumers walk past vacated shops and stare through the dirty windows - the 'Everything Must Go' posters growing faded and tatty; the sellotape holding them up turning yellow and dry - into haunted rooms occupied by nothing but worn carpet and unopened mail.  Empty facilities sit rusting in stasis.  This decay and waste reduces the amount of capital in the system, thus opening up the possibility of a restoration of profit to the average.  It was the accumulation of capital that lead to the fall, remember.

Eventually, the limping casualties that are still viable are gobbled up by the predators big enough to survive the recession.  These leviathans heave the system back out of crisis and the cycle begins again.  But capital becomes ever more concentrated and centralized into the hands of the great predators.  Their power becomes so great that their interests merge with that of the nation state.  Competition and accumulation are played out at the level of global imperialist competition.  Nation states squabble over access to, shares of, control over resources and markets.  They squabble because their existence is ever more bound up with increasingly concentrated and centralized capital.

The system generates entropy at every level.

It even generates entropy of different kinds at different levels of the concept.

Slump generates stasis and dereliction.

Boom generates depreciation and the proliferation of technological clutter and decay.

War generates massive destruction and wastage.

Peace generates the hegemony of huge capitals that standardize and homogenize everything into a vast stream of indistinguishable, banal, bland cultural porridge.  Even without the hyper-consumerism in which we now live, photography and mass production created the stripping away of the aura of the individual work of art, the vertigo of endless reproduction.

If capitalism manages to raise the productive forces as far as some think it will... if it one day creates nanotechnology that will alter matter at the ceullular, or even molecular level... there is a mooted possibility that such technology will result in the reduction of all matter into an undifferentiated mass of shuffled, randomized, unpredictable, informationless, apocalyptic unstuff.

This is the ecophagic apocalypse of the 'grey goo' scenario.  It has fascinated writers of science fiction more than it has genuinely worried scientists.  This is because it ties directly into something that we all know and feel and see about the world of technology, industry and modernity (of capitalism): that it has entropy woven into its fabric.

The world of the machine is - from certain angles - a world of monsters; monsters that champ and chew and digest and excrete human experience.

We live in the shit of Moloch.  And nothing is more entropic than shit.

*

To recap:

Modernity, which is the age of mass industrial technology, is thus also the age of science, whence comes the concept of entropy.  The scientific concept of entropy, besides addressing concerns of industry and science, also expresses - or lends itself to analogies which express - longstanding human anxieties about time, decay, death, etc.  In the modern age, which is the age of capitalism (and hence of mass production and overproduction of commodities), such anxieties are ramped up beyond any level before known in human culture because the modern age is an age of omnipresent wastage, rubbish, obsolescence, clutter, malfunction and destruction.

To expand a bit:

In the past, anxieties about time and decay were not exacerbated by technology and industrial production (for the simple reason that they did not yet exist, or predominate).  Such anxieties were about age and illness and death.  They were treated in myths, legends, fairytales, etc., with their seemingly endless concern with young girls and crones, fertility of land linked to human fertility, death and rebirth, imprisonment, eternal guardianship, etc.  Myths and legends and fairytales endlessly riff on order turned to chaos, chaos turned to order, potential wasted, youth lost, age consuming youth, youth banishing age, fertility banishing barrenness, and so on.

Science fiction is, I think, the reiteration of myth and legend in the age of modernity, hence in the idioms of technology.  There's a definition of sci-fi as being "about the relationship between man and his tools"... yet the "tools" that concern sci-fi are robots, spaceships, computers, etc... all of which are recognisably projections of trends or possibilities within modern industrial technology.  That's why it isn't sci-fi when ancient legends tell of magic swords, but it is sci-fi when writers in the 19th-21st centuries tell of advanced machines that can fly people between the stars.

Therefore, the preoccupation of science fiction - or at least certain strands of science fiction - with entropy is hardly surprising.  SF is the literary/cultural form that is more a product of modernity than any other.  It might be the said to be the adaptation of the most basic forms of storytelling to the landscape (or culturescape) of a world dominated by modern capitalism.  SF is the mythic expression of frenzied technological innovation, general commodity production, overproduction, overaccumulation, obsolescence, re-investment and re-innovation, more production, more obsolescence, more rubbish tips, and so on.

Entropy might just be a key link in this chain.  It is an idea that arose from, and is of great utility to, modernity.  It is an idea expressed in and by the industrial machine, the technologeme.  It expresses something inherent and unavoidable within all technology.  It refers to something that is more visible and intense in all our lives because of mass production.  It also provides a link to older forms of discourse that express ancient human concerns.  After all, anxieties about age, illness, infertility and death have not gone away... they have just been supplemented by anxieties about the aging, malfunctioning, failure and threatening behaviour of technology and industrial products.

Entropy might just be the missing link between myth and science-fiction.

It might just be why the quintessential modern literary/cultural genre of the machine age also became - so often and on so many levels - a reiteration of myth.

Gonzo Marx

Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc.  Don't mind me.


Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff.  Broadly, that's what humans are: the apes that make stuff.  Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man "the tool-making animal", a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the 'big brain' driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers.  The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires.  The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system.  The division of labour.  Specialisation without expertise.  Organisation of time.  The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers.  Mass production.  Heavy industry.  Conveyor belts.  Fordism.  Mechanisation.  Computer-run facilities. 

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating.  When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it's hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology.  This was also part of the rise of capitalism.  Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the 'Early Modern Period', the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him.  His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant's ships were returning safely, laden with goods.  Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets.  When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous.  The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful.  They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave).  They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe.  They ferried people to industrial murder factories.  They allowed man to fly.  To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds.  They put apes on the moon. 

And they transformed inner space too.  "You've discovered television, haven't you?"  And here we are, on the glorious interweb.

Things change faster than ever before in human history.  The technology of the world in which Plato died was essentially the same as the technology of the world into which he was born.  The waterwheel and the hand axe lasted for millenia.  Capitalism brought tools and toys that become obsolete in weeks.

When I was born, analogue cassette tapes still seemed pretty cool to people.  I'm only 35 (nearly) and I'm currently listening to one of the thousands of digitalised songs on my mp3 player, a machine that fits into my pocket and has thousands of times the processing power and memory capacity of the state of the art of the mid 70s.

The things we make... the engines... the artefacts... they behave like this because they are the products of capitalism.  They are commodities.  Made to be sold as much as to be used.

Products breed and teem and change and mutate and multiply like bacteria.  They seem to have minds of their own.  They move without us, they talk without us, they do things and say things we don't understand, they assail us with cryptic error messages, they catch viruses.  They fly without pilots and destroy villages in Pakistan. 

Those last ones we call "drones", naming them after living things (with irony as mordant as it is unconscious, we call them after the mindless worker bees in the rigid insectile hierarchy).  This is commodity fetishism.

It's amazing, when you stop to think about it, just how CONSTANTLY we think and talk about inanimate stuff, about products, about commodities, as though they are alive... and powerful.

The stock market is a product.  It is something made by the apes.  Yet we report upon its twitches and tremours and undulations and ululations and sneezes and farts as though we are reporting the natural bodly processes and moods of some great beast, some kraken, some leviathan to which we owe homage, to who's whims we are subject. 

Meanwhile, apes make other apes into commodities.  Chattel slavery may be rarer than it once was, but wage slavery has never been more common.  Our labour - that is, ourselves... we are the ape that makes stuff, remember... our productive capabilities and inclinations are fundamental to our nature - are bought and sold on a job market.  We are speculated upon and traded in like junk bonds or pork futures.  Longpigs, simmering in the cannibal cauldron of employment.

The stuff breeds and teems as people die in swathes.  From hunger, from AIDS, from despair, from by-products, from environmental backlash, from sheer grinding poverty.  Much of this death is man-made, directly or indirectly.  Even the entirely natural disasters and natural plagues (if there are such things) find an accomplice in the man-made system that creates impoverished hemispheres of the planet, that results in coastal shanty towns, that corrals people into filthy prisons, that encourages mass prostitution, that loots and subjugates Africa to the West.

We in the rich world splurge at the shops, investing in things as though they are charms and icons and totems... sometimes literally.  Religion is bought and sold.  Give till it hurts.  The Lord wants your credit card number.

More broadly, the elision continues beyond the profaned and commodified sacred, which is only the most brazen manifestation of this syndrome.

We both lust over and worship the sleek, mass-produced things... like the audiences to those reverent but furtively sexualised icons of Jesus or the Madonna.  We expect these sexy things to change how we look, how we are percieved, how we feel, how we think, how we eat, how and who and when we fuck.  We expect deliverance and transfiguration in return for our money.  We've transferred our lust and hope from the foot to the shoe, like some poor pervert who forgets the beauty of the toes and can only get hard over PVC fetish boots.

As with religion, the ape bows down before the totem pole that she/he made and worships it as though it is a power outside her/himself... forgetting that she/he made it and that it represents her/his own powers.

In the capitalist world, this is exacerbated a thousand fold.


I, Product

The people who make everything do not do so under conditions of their own choosing.  They are on the job market, so they end up making stuff for the stuff market.  We make what we're told, as many as we're told, for purposes we don't choose.  Indeed, there is no purpose beyond the creation of commodities.  Things are made to be sold.  The iPad is not made in order to express human creativity.  The iPad is made by people whose creative lives have been yoked to the creation of iPads by people who think they can sell iPads in order to make profit that will keep their iPad-making racket going.

We end up buried. 

Stuff is made in order to be saleable in order to fund the making of saleable stuff.

That is human creativity slaved to a system of general commodity production.  That is not human self-expression.  This is alienation.

And the factories and shops and conveyor belts and automated production lines that make the system work are also made things, products of the same system.

The truncheons that thump us when we riot against the system, or even just some aspect of it, are made and sold things.

The newspapers that constantly tell us that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE are made and sold things.

Not only is human creativity subverted into the production of commodities, human creativity is also subverted into the production of the materiel of the system of commodity production.  And this is a war too.  Because the people that own the factories and shops and conveyor belts and truncheons and newspapers are NOT the same people who actually make them, or the things that such things help to make.  The profits go to the owners, not the makers.  So the makers find themselves making the weapons of their enemies.

Indeed, we are all glowered-over and dominated by the stuff we and previous generations have made. This is old labour, petrified into threatening and ruling facts.  This dead labour, lording it over the living.

In some ways, it's always been so, and always had to be.


Genesis of the Dialects

Genesis (the book) is such a powerful and resonant text because it describes the moment when the ape became aware of... or perhaps invented... good and evil, guilt and shame.  Which is to say, empathy... which is to say, reflection.

The beasts of the field do not know they are naked.  It is the knowledge of nakedness that brings the abashedness of mutual desire (or the lack of desire), of mutual judgement.

The knowledge comes from reflection.  He looks at her; she looks at him; they become aware of each other's gazes; they see their own reflections in each other's eyes; they imagine their own desire mirrored in the mind of the other; they see themselves from the outside.

Let's shift the sense of the word 'reflection' in a way that is surely the result of a connection deep within the word itself.  Reflection is also cogitation.  It is also the turning of a gaze inwards.  This is possible because of language.

Language is an inner narration that externalises and an external communication that internalises.  To hear the external communication of another is to evesdrop upon their internal narrative.  It is to compare it to one's own inner narrative.  Again, words become another mirror in which we see ourselves reflected.

Adam and Eve begin with a language that is non-figurative.  Adam names the animals and the names he gives them are them.  The fall severs the sign from the signified, the referent from the referred-to.  That is the curse but also the release.  The transformation of words into metaphors is what makes figuration possible.  It brings the possibility of knowledge, because all knowledge is metaphor and analogy.

The most human analogy is the analogy we draw between ourselves and others.  Empathy.  Empathy is the parent of guilt.  Empathy is the parent of love.  Empathy is the mirror in which we regard ourselves.  All moral considerations are considerations of ourselves reflected in the eyes of another.

This nest of complementary meanings resolve themselves into the bittersweet but progressive tragedy whereby the apes achieve conception of their own reflections.

All of this is simply to pay the powerful myth the compliment of refusing to take it literally... which is to say, obey it.  The text itself instructs us not to take it literally.  To do so is not only the height of idiocy but is also to insult and abuse the text itself, more so than to dismiss it entirely (which is also very stupid).

The same moment - the moment of the fall, the apple moment - is also the moment when the people in the garden scoop up leaves to make their first clothes, to hide their erotic parts from each other.  This is an attempt to deintensify the sensations of desire, empathy, guilt.

It is also the fashioning of a tool, the cooptation of something in the natural environment to play an artificial purpose (literally, the role of an artifact) in the life of man and woman.

It is, in embryo, the birth of the product, even the commodity.  The apple moment.  The iFall, one might say.

But the moment when knowledge of nakedness brings knowledge of empathy, and thus desire and guilt and shame (it is pointless to deny that these are inherent parts of sexuality... because sexuality is inherently bound of up mutual revelation and subjection to each others' appetites... hence mutual judgement), is also the moment of defiance of God.  It is the moment when the smothering, protective blanket of the dictats of the undefiable FatherRulerKingComputerSky (nature, circumstance, Things As They Are, however you want to interpret Him) is torn apart by man and woman, by their new-found (as they percieve it) awareness.  If they know, they can choose.

But their choice is inextricably bound up with the tool, with the manual use of nature, with the fashioning of clothes, with the construction of the artifact, with the transformation of the word into a machine for analogy.

This is why the myth has Adam and Eve chased from the garden into a world of work and pain.  For too long, interpreters have concentrated on the appearance of Death on the scene.  But Death is the least of it.  It is the toil and grief of life which constitutes the really pertinent feature of the ex-Garden landscape.  Cain and Abel have to tend the land, which is what leads to the murder.

The myth merges the emergence of conscious, self-aware, empathic humanity from animal kind with the emergence of civillised (attaching no moral connotations to that word) humans from the gatherers and hunters of prehistory.

The elision is a powerful one, perhaps even an unavoidable one in a myth which arose before knowledge of our animal ancestry.

The tool brings settlement, agriculture, surplus and hence class.  Hierarchy arises to confiscate the surplus created by humanity in possession of powerful tools such as hoes and scythes and farming and settled villages.  Hierarchy manages, centralises, organises and hoardes.  Hierarchy alienates the mass of humanity from the fruits of their labour via confiscation.  Humans begin to channel their labour into social ends, which under hierarchy means into great, locked granaries controlled and administered by layers of priests and administrators and bureaucrats.  The farmer's labour feeds not him and his family and extended tribe, with the labour and the results in common.  The farmer's labour feeds the gaping maw of the settlement, the village, the city, the nation, etc.

This is the world of grinding toil and alienated products that humanity finds itself in after the expulsion from the rugged and dirty Eden of pre-class society, of hunting, of scavenging, of following herds of dairy animals, of nomadism.  This is why representations like this...

By Masaccio.  The most moving depiction of the expulsion in all art, in my opinion.

...show Adam and Eve chased out of the garden by an angel wielding a sword.  Swords are tools.  Weapons may be said to be the ur-tools.  The weapon to cleave the ground, or to cleave the skull of the food animal.  Cain and Abel work the land; Cain kills Abel as he might slaughter a sheep.  The tool is the sharp edge that pokes the humans out of their prelapsarian, pre-alienation world.

It is, literally, the alienation machine.

This is one reason why humans have always told stories about their tools, about how their tools seem to turn upon them, dominate them, attack them.


The War Machines

The walls of Jericho fell because they encircled a settlement that was coveted by outsiders.  The products of one side (the walls) are tumbled by the products of the other (in the story, trumpets).  Robbery with violence is the organising principle of imperialism, of all war... and it comes from the tool, from the surplus, from the class system that makes organised armies of expendable grunts.

The whole Old Testament is the story of the gradual, painful, war-torn transition of little nomadic bands of nations and tribes (really just peripatetic extended families) into settled, argicultural, hierarchical, alienated societies.  Or perhaps I should say more alienated... because the moment Adam and Eve really see each other and see the potential to make leaves into clothes and words into metaphors, they also become alienated from the natural world from which they sprung.

The beast's condition is not harmony with nature exactly, but alienation is the nature not of the beast but of the human.  It is what happens when we view everything outside ourselves through the mirror of language, of metaphor, of empathy, of judgement, and of the artifact.

It is possible that the myth of the iFall does not recognise the possibility of achievement, progress, ascent, science (to use the term broadly) - of escape from those cruelties, miseries and banalities before class - without the curses of alienated toil.  This is a limitation of the myth.


Vengeance in Venice

In the myth, work is post-fall man's curse and redemption.

This is the ideology of a settled, agricultural society with hierarchies comprising toiling masses at the base: people are told that toil is their lot in life, their just punishment, but also that it is their chance of redemption, their spiritual duty.  The higher layers, who toiled less if at all, had to be sanctified by other means: by making them warriors or priests.

Interestingly, for centuries, usurers were reviled for accumulating without labour.  But the rise of capital was also the rise of finance, so the taboo on usury had to change.  Usury was a necessary evil for trading societies, often displaced onto the Jews for that reason.  The Venetian merchant (who might have spied his goods-laden ships returning through a telescope manufactured and sold by Galileo... who was born in the same year as the merchant's creating author) hates Shylock because he needs him.

On the grander scale, usury was recast as banking.

Dante has usurers in the Seventh Circle of his Inferno, condemned to an eternity of never being able to still their fidgeting fingers as punishment for not turning those fingers to productive use during their lives.  The Devil finds work for idle hands, as they say.  But Dante, like many great and crucial figures in literature, was dramatising the contradictions of a time of deep social transition.  His Florence was that of the early-Renaissance, of the rise of bankers and moneylenders.  These people were aware of their taint.  But in a world where everything was becoming a commodity, even usurers, bankers and moneylenders could buy salvation, theological and social (if, indeed, there was a distinction).  If they were good enough at their sinful work to become rich, they could pay for expensive endowments to churches and chapels and monasteries.

One pre-Medici moneylender was able to pay for a huge fresco depicting Dante's Hell, complete with suffering moneylenders (his less successful competitors, presumably).

The Medicis themselves adopted the Magi as their mascots; the three wise men who had paid tribute to the infant Christ with gold and luxurious spices.

Cosima Medici built an entire monastery with his dirty money, in which he came to play at being a penitent.  His monastic cell was more opulent than the others, naturally.  He faced the same dilemma as Claudius in Hamlet: how does one meaningfully repent without sacrificing the gains for which one sinned?  Claudius, unlike Cosima, recognised the impossibility of squaring that particular vicious circle.


The End of Time

This is not to say that we are perpetually and inevitably doomed to the kind of escalating alienation that has been a feature of all civilisation up to now... (that's a different story).  Alienation is, I think, an inherent part of being human... of being sentient, with sentience bound up with the use of language.  How much alienation we suffer, how severe it is, and what form it takes... this is all up to us.  We don't need to live in societies which force us to confront the products of our labour as hostile, alien, outer Others.  We don't need to live in societies where the State confronts us as an enemy, where industry confronts us as exploitation, where production and consumption are so far outside our control that they seem to be the unpredictable boons of a mystical realm of markets.  We don't need to live in a word of private property and wages.  We don't essentially need, as humans, to live within stratifications of class and hierarchy.

For most of human history, before the rise of surplus and class, we lived as hunters and gatherers.  Whatever the considerable cruelties, miseries and banalities of such a life, there was no class as we would recognise it, no war as we would recognise it, no tyranny except the tyranny of predator and dearth.

In principle, at least, we can do better.  The history before the iFall proves that.