Marathon
I would never have believed that the New York
marathon could move you to tears. It really is the end-of-the-world show. Can
we speak of suffering freely entered into as we might speak of a state of
servitude freely entered into? In driving rain, with helicopters circling
overhead and the crowd cheering, wearing aluminum foil caps and squinting at
their stop-watches, or bare-chested, that death by exhaustion that was the fate
of the first Marathon man some two thousand years ago. And he, let us not
forget, brought a message of victory to Athens. They also dream no doubt of
bringing a victory message, but there are too many of them and their message
has lost all meaning: it is merely the message of their arrival, at the end of
their exertions, the twilight message of a futile, superhuman effort.
Collectively, they might rather seem to be bringing the message of a
catastrophe for the human race, which you can see becoming more and more
decrepit by the hour as the runners come in, from the competitive athletic
types who arrive first to the wrecks who are literally carried to the finishing
line by their friends. There are 17,000 runners and you can’t help but thinking
back to the Battle of Marathon, where there weren’t even 17,000 soldiers in the
field. There are 17,000 of them and each one runs alone, without even a thought
of victory, but simply in order to feel alive. “We wont’, gasped the man from
Marathon as he expired. ‘I did it’, sighs the exhausted marathon runner of New
York as he collapses on the grass in Central Park.
I Did It!
The slogan of a new form of advertising activity, of autistic performance,
a pure and empty form, a challenge to one’s own self that has replaced the
Promethean ecstasy of competition, effort, and success. The New York Marathon
has become a sort of international symbol of such fetishistic performance, of
the mania for an empty victory, the joy engendered by a feat that is of no
consequence.
I ran the New York Marathon: ‘I did it!’
I conquered Annapurna: ‘I did it!’
The moon landing is the same kind of thing: ‘We did
it!’ The event was ultimately not so
surprising; it was an event pre-programmed into the course of science and
progress. We did it. But it has not revived the millenarian dream on conquering
space. In a sense, it has exhausted it.
Carrying out any kind of program produces the same sense of futility that comes
from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a
child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.
The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is
running to show you are capable of getting every last drop out of yourself, to
prove it . . .to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry
the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free
publicity for existence.
Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of
weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly
self-evident.
Mormons
Compiling inventories of everything, stocking everything, memorizing
everything.
Hence the elephants enveloped in liquid bitumen, whose bones have become fossilized
in its black, mineral viscosity, together with the lions, mammoths, and wolves
who roamed the plains of Los Angeles and were the first, prehistoric victims of the oil fields.
Today they have all received a second embalming at Hancock Park in a museum
devoted to the rote-learning of prehistory. And, in conformity with the prevailing
moral code, all this is presented with conviction. Americans are a people of conviction, convinced of everything
and seeking to convince. One of the aspects of their good faith is their
stubborn determination to reconstitute everything of the past and a history
which were not their own and which they have largely destroyed or spirited
away. Renaissance castles, fossilized elephants, Indians on reservations,
sequoias as holograms, etc.
In storing details on their computers of
all the known souls in the civilized (white) countries, the Mormons of Salt
Lake City are behaving no differently from other Americans, who share the same
missionary spirit. It is never too late to revive your origins. It is their
destiny: since they were not the first to be in on history, they will be the
first to immortalize everything by reconstitution (by putting things in
museums, they can match in an instant the fossilization process nature took
millions of years to complete) .But the conception Americans have of the museum
is much wider than our own. To them everything is worthy of protection, embalming,
restoration. Everything can have a second birth, the eternal birth of the
simulacrum. Not only are the American missionaries, yet are also Anabaptists: having
missed out on the original baptism, They dream of baptizing everything a second
time and only accord value to this later sacrament which is , as we know, a
repeat performance of the first, but its repetition as something more real. And
this indeed is the perfect definition of the simulacrum. All the Anabaptists
are sectarian, and sometimes violent. Americans are no exception to this rule.
To reconstruct things in their exact form, so as to present them on the Day of
Judgement, they are prepared to destroy and exterminate – Thomas Muntzer was an
Anabaptist.
It is not by chance that it is the Mormons who run the world’s biggest
computerization project: the recording of twenty generations of living souls
through out the world, a process which is seen as a re-baptizing of those
souls, bringing them a new promise of salvation. Evangelization has become a
mission of mutants, of extraterrestrial, and if it has progressed (?) in that
direction, it is thanks to the latest memory-storage techniques. And these have
been made possible by the deep puritanism of computer science, an intensely
Calvinistic, Presbyterian discipline, which has inherited the universal and
scientific rigidity of the techniques for achieving salvation by good works. The Counter-Reformation
methods of the Catholic Church, with its naïve sacramental practices, its
cults, its more archaic and popular beliefs, could never compete with this
modernity
Executive Terminal
Basic Extermination
Metastatic Consumption.
American Marxism
When I see Americans, particularly American intellectuals, casting a
nostalgic eye towards Europe, its history, its metaphysics, its cuisine, and
its past, I tell myself that this is just a case of unhappy transference.
History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really
cross the ocean, in spite of many impressive attempts that have been made to
adapt them to new surroundings. This is a just revenge for the fact that we Europeans
have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to
cross the ocean, though in the other direction. There are products which cannot
be imported or exported. This is not our loss- and theirs. If, for us, society
is a carnivorous flower, history for them is an exotic one. Its fragrance is no
more convincing than the bouquet of California wines (in spite of all the efforts
being expended to make us believe otherwise.)
Not only can history not be caught up, but it seems that in this ‘capitalist’
society capital can never actually be grasped in its present reality. It is not
that our Marxist critics have not tried to run after it, but it always stays a
length ahead of them. By the time one phase has been unmasked, capital has
already passed onto another. Capital cheats. It doesn’t play by the rules of
critique, the true game of history. It eludes the dialectic, which only reconstitutes
it after the event, a revolution behind. Even anti-capitalist revolutions only
serve to give fresh impetus to its own: they are the equivalent of ‘exogenous’ events like wars, crisis, or the discovery
of gold mines, which set capital off on a new developmental process on fresh bases.
In the end, these new theorists themselves reveal the inanity of their hopes.
By reinventing capital in each successive phases on the basis of the primacy of
the political economy, they simply conform the absolute initiative capital enjoys
as historical event. They therefore fall straight into their own trap and give
themselves no chance of getting ahead of it. And this at the same time ensures-
as was perhaps their objective- the continuing validity of their retrospective
analysis.
Reagan
Reagan’s popularity gives us all food for thought. But we should first establish
what type of confidence he is accorded. It is almost too good to be true. How
can it be that every defense has fallen before him? How can it be that no mistake
or political reversal damages his standing and that, paradoxically, his failures
even improve it (which infuriates our French leaders, for whom things are the
other way around: the more initiative and goodwill they show, the less popular
they become). But the point is precisely that the confidence placed in Reagan
is a paradoxical confidence, Just as
we distinguish between real and paradoxical sleep, we should also distinguish
between real and paradoxical confidence. The former is granted to a man or
leader on the basis of his qualities and success. Paradoxical confidence is
confidence we place in someone on the basis of their failure or absence of
qualities. The prototype of this confidence is the failure of prophecy – a
process that is well-known from the history of messianic and millenarian movements-
following which the group, instead of denying its leader and dispersing, closes
ranks around him and creates religious, sectarian, or ecclesiastical
institutions to preserve the faith. Institutions all the more solid for deriving
their energy from the failure of the prophesy. This ‘supplemental’ confidence
never wavers, because it derives from the
disavowal of failure. Such, making all due allowance, is the amazing aura that
surrounds Reagan’s credibility, and which necessarily makes one think that the
American prophecy, the grand prospect of utopia on earth combined with world
power, has suffered a setback; that something of that imaginary feat that was
to crown the history of two centuries
has precisely not been realized, and that Reagan is the product of the failure
of that prophecy.
In Reagan, a system of values that was formerly effective turns into something
ideal and imaginary. The image of America becomes imaginary for Americans themselves,
at a point when it is without a doubt profoundly compromised. This
transformation of spontaneous confidence into paradoxical confidence and an achieved
utopia into an imaginary hyperbole seems to me to mark a decisive turning-point.
But doubtless things are not this simple. For I am not saying that this change
of direction in the Reagan era is anything other than an incidental
development. Who knows? You have the same
difficulty today distinguishing between a process and its simulation, for example
between a flight and a flight simulation. America, too, has entered this era of
un-decidability: is it really powerful or merely simulating power?
. . .
. . . .
The American Desert
Why is LA, why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from
all depths there- a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to
meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace,
with no origin, no reference points.
We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavor and seduction, we
who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic
distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly
attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental
shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this
vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts. To
discover that one can exalt in the
liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of in-difference.
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