'The human face is an empty power, a field of death ... after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken & breathed one still has the impression that it hasn't even begun to say what it is & what it knows.'— Antonin Artaud, July 1947.
William Blake said it well in "Auguries of Innocence":
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
"When we see a person’s lips move and his tongue flap, we must decide whether what is coming out is ‘the universe expressing itself’, or some idiot rational plan that he has concocted."– emile
Every epoch-defining revolution has simultaneously been a counter-revolution. Only the criterion (such as "iron" or "information") changes, making the epoch nothing but a value judgement wrapped around a talking point. What revolves has been the state ("the condition or state of affairs that currently exists") because at base, progress, consumerism and gentrification (here in the country, called "rural economic development") represent a single phenomenon – the suppression of symbolism is the death of community, itself a synonym of free association (in both material and linguistic senses).
In the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations."The potential for rupture (which is to say "metamorphosis") in mid twentieth century Euroamerika was only a repetition of that which a full century earlier occurred on the Russian steppe, a terrain which looks even more familiar today. In the end, there has only been a single epoch, and historians, like theologians or other dogmatists have been correct to portray it as the only reality, but in geological time, six thousand years of civilisation only amounts to a nanosecond. History as media must exclude it's own subject matter to re-present each present age as the "Modern" one, unique above all others, a set of constrained symbols wrapped in gagetry, patriotism and war-mongering, because, after all, it's just got to get better.– wiki: conspicuous consumption
Hence the nostalgia (or durative fetish) for failed revolutions is at the same time a longing for community, the renewal of openings, free-flowing symbolism oozing outside of transaction or economic/structural adjustments, poetry as subversive of institutions of exclusion, the embrace of ambiguity as a renewed interest in novelty, bringing possibility back into the cosmos:
"The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead” to humans only because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism … Look deeper. You’ll need a magnifying glass … On the atomic and sub-atomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles are spinning simultaneously forward and backward, sideways and forever at speeds so incalculable that expressions such as “arrival,” “departure,” and “have a nice day” become meaningless. It is on these levels that “magic” occurs.
The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters."
It is above all the form of the media, not the specific content, which has an ideological effect. The media’s specific informational content is subordinate to the function of producing consensus by deterring thought. Knowledge of the event as an aspect of life is prevented, creating an atmosphere of stupidity. Consensus functions by the exclusion of more radical others, and the mobilisation of resources to destroy them. It is achieved by powerlessness. The personal response, and responsiveness, is not possible in mass media. Disasters past and present are neutralised in a simple emotional response. Events like Live Aid involve viewers enjoying the spectacle of their own compassion."
"The University has always been, in some form or another, an institution for producing the ideological justifications, and consequently their material realisation, for the forces of the state, its image of splendour and the “happiness” of the ruling society. It has been as fundamental an aspect of class society as has been the dominant media: a society in which the ruling class speaks to, and tries to convince, itself and society generally in order to ever-perfect its forms of social control. Whilst academia’s differing illusions of “objectivity” and “neutral” acquisition of knowledge have changed and developed, along with its intake, over the centuries, its fundamental prop for this miserable world has always remained. So it should be no surprise that academia has produced more modern and subtler versions of how to preserve hierarchical order in the 21st century
The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a supreme principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional resolve to act immorally. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact — that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie] — offered me the first insight into this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
...Let no-one say ideological work is the same as building work or working in a hospital or a call centre: the hierarchical division of labour has always meant that capitalism, even in its initial development, wasn’t just capital but was also an “ism”. It meant that, as well as an armed and economic force, it was also an ideology brutally materialised. Ideas for the ruling class, developed by professional intellectuals, were not merely ideas any more than religion, developed by the priesthood before the bourgeoisie, was merely religion.”
