ECOLOGY & ITS DISCONTENTS
Replacement Text 02/05/03 / Updated 06/29/04
PULSE CHECK / THE WORLD-SOUL FIRE SALE (v.2003.1)I. THEY ARE OUT THERE
Good Morning, Citizens! Welcome to the Corporate Century! THEY will be more than happy to sell you your birthright. THEY control almost everything: THEY own the airwaves (the so-called aether); THEY have metered your water; and, THEY bombard you daily with useless information (television, print media, ads on the subway, the highway, the Internet). THEY have somehow convinced us that time and space belongs to them. THEY will find a way in the future to insert advertisements into your sleep and dreams. THEY, of course, will reserve ad-free sleep and dreams for themselves. THEY are working on metering your sleep and dreams (THEY've already metered your everyday sweat and tears), and, Heaven and Hell permit, THEY will find a way to meter your daydreams as well. THEY trade in points -- 'the spread'. THEY have such subtle-colossal clout that you hardly realize when you are not being taken to the cleaners.
THEY control politics, sports (including the Olympics), most media, food production and distribution, and on and on. Bread and circuses, indeed! THEY'll call you day and night (but mostly around 6-7 pm) to sell you something / anything; THEY've got banks of phones at the ready. Every couple of years these same phone banks are utilized to sell you the latest readymade candidate for 'higher' office. THEY bombard your snail- and e-mailboxes with torrents of junk mail. Ask your snail-mailperson and s/he'll say: "It pays the bills." THEY've got the margins calculated on the margins of margins. THEY've got massive Brainiac 8000 computers monitoring your e-pulse and tracking every electronic blink of your eye. THEY'll sell you this and that (no payments or interest until 2004) and THEY'll happily take a lien on your house, your children, your car, or your lean-to in the meantime.
THEY've got the vision thing nailed to a spreadsheet. THEY're parasitical. THEY're MBAs with a mission. If THEY screw up, THEY will dump their debt on you the stockholder, or on you the taxpayer (it makes no difference to them), and float away on golden parachutes.
THEY have you strung out on credit, secretly servicing their own monumental debt -- a gargantuan 'hangover' from the acquisitions frenzy of the last few decades. THEY will loan you your own money for 19.9% (APR) and 'invest' it for you at 1.0% (APR). THEY have an endless stream of vacuous images, useless data, and products past their sell-by date for you. Their tentacles are everywhere. Their apologists write weekly newspaper columns extolling their imaginary virtues. THEY have magazines devoted to themselves, picturing themselves, glorifying themselves. THEY have offshore bank accounts and THEY rarely if ever pay taxes except when really, really pressed to. THEY launder their money in the capitals of capital -- Washington, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and, now, Beijing. THEY buy and sell you everyday. THEY trade in futures on you. THEY love, loath, and need you!
THEY are ravenous! And THEY have no loyalties (THEY periodically eat one another). At home, THEY will abandon the Bush-Cheney circus as soon as THEY lock in new tax breaks and various and sundry 'incentives' as far as the blind eye cannot see. Actually, THEY don't believe in government (good, bad, or otherwise). What THEY do believe in is 'profitability' and 'return on investment' -- this abstract, non-thing has led straight to the de-materialization of just about everything, but most importantly capital. De-materialized capital moves at light-speed through the neo-archaic aether. De-materialized capital is infinitely malleable and can be moved hither and thither in a moment's notice. Indeed, all that is solid has been vaporized.
THEY print, pulp, print, pulp, and print millions of unreadable books each year. Some of their authors get several million dollar advances (especially if they are 'connected' and represent 'access') -- it's called 'synergy' -- even though the books end up in the dumpster. THEY have super-bookstores in which to display these useless books. Some say THEY crush little bookstores everywhere. But there are still itty-bitty independent bookstores here and there.
THEY cut down entire forests, pulp the trees and churn out flimsy, facsimile stuff for you to buy and throw out the next year. THEY collect your garbage and charge you to haul it to the nearest toxic landfill or toxin-spewing incinerator. THEY never live downwind of either. It's called 'waste management'. It used to be called garbage collection.
THEY put asbestos in your buildings and then charge you an arm and a leg to take it away. THEY dump tons of toxins into the ground and surface waters around the globe every year and make billions selling you pretty plastic bottles of 'potable' water. THEY convert Heaven to Hell everyday, while maintaining that THEY control access to both, which means that THEY have convinced themselves that Heaven is for the elect and Hell for everyone else.
THEY have infiltrated the environmental NGOs and THEY own the EPA, FDA, FCC, and ETC. THEY write legislation and send it to the local, state, and federal legislatures to be rubber stamped. THEY have armies of lobbyists ready to march at a moment's notice.
THEY sail the seven seas. THEY've got fleets of ships roving to and fro. THEY've got rusting, leaking, single-hulled oil tankers registered in exotic places like Liberia and Panama City. THEY deliver sludge to your doorstep. The minute particulars of this world-wide fiasco wash up daily on your favorite beaches. THEY are alchemists and magicians: THEY transmute sticky goo into plastic phones, plastic cards, plastic mesh fences, plastic clothing, plastic toys, plastic cups and plates and cutlery, and plastic bags for you to carry all this plastic junk home in.
II. THE UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF THEYNESSTHEY have interceded between you and the Real. THEY understand that the Real only ever presents itself as phantasm. What THEY have done, therefore, is turn the economy of the Real into an economy of desire (a super-charged libidinal economy). THEY have not necessarily read Lacan, but THEY understand this situation nonetheless. THEY understand because this situation is an age-old situation. If THEY suspect that you know that THEY know what THEY know, THEY will threaten to go ballistic.
Some say THEY don't exist, that THEY are a 'structural' no-thing. But I've seen their McMansions, and their McCars, and they appear from time to time on television or in the papers (lately in handcuffs). THEY've got jails for themselves in the countryside where THEY can play golf and network while 'doing time', before setting up a philanthropic foundation to hide their ill-gotten wealth. Some say THEY are us. I'm not sure. I know THEY are out there somewhere.
Their spokesmouthpersons appear on television every evening at 6 and 6:30 pm to report on the day's transactions, the day's casualties, the day's 'collateral damage'. This is the same time of day that THEY are trying to call you to sell you something you don't want or need. Don't THEY talk to each other?
THEY think THEY own everything. THEY actually own next to everything, and it's this 'next to everything' that is at stake everyday. As such, what THEY do not own is what is so very important. It is this ... this gap in their ownership of almost everything that is the way out. Come, then, let us follow The Goat Track toward 'S' -- toward that Small, Powerful Thing THEY do not control. It leads away to 'there', and, through a secret feedback loop, back to 'here'.
Perhaps the words of Massimo Cacciari on the work of sculptor-painter Emilio Vedova bear witness to this age-old problem: "Vedova's Carnival has the following itinerary: to follow, try, probe, with the hands and with all the nerves, one might say, every trace, every flash, every stammering of words in this 'state of misery.' To be alert, listening. When will night come to an end? Here, a mask seems to open up to one possible answer -- or to invite one not to tire of questioning. What is Carnival, if not the repetition of the invitation to 'know oneself,' in the mask and beyond every mask? To put on the mask that always terrifies anew, and to put it down again? Carnival is the culmination of the past-state, but at the same time it is its catastrophe. For the past-state is completed, we can no longer fear it. But we cannot know if this instant will be able to take shape, to utter the word -- if it will be a new beginning or none other than the first moment of repetition of the same thing." --Massimo Cacciari, "Finally, Vedova's 'Carnivals'", in Emilio Vedova (Milan: Charta, 2001)
Dr. Prof. Ing. I. M. Avenarius (January 2003)
LAC - OTHER OPTIONS (Z Magazine)
EXTRA-CREDIT READINGCarte de Tendre (Samizdat)
JOHN PILGER - The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2003)
MICHAEL ALBERT - PARECON: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003)
