Unable to Die

“Only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever.”

The speaker is Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a highly regarded novel about September 11, 2001, not long ago made into a film starring Tom Hanks. Foer speaks that line as part of the commencement address he gave at Middlebury College this spring. At least one can read the line in the essay adapted from that address and published in the editorial section of the New York Times this past Sunday (June 9, 2013). The “they” at issue—those who might “live forever”—are the real or imagined grandchildren of those Foer is addressing.

Immediately after making his remark about such possibly deathless grandchildren, Foer extends it to cover even some of us already alive today. “It’s possible,” he writes, “that many reading these words will never die.”

For all of our sakes, whether we are already here or yet to come, let us fervently pray that the possibility Foer envisions for us, the possibility of living forever, may never be realized. The price we would have to pay for losing our capacity for death is far too steep. It would cost us our very humanity, and all chance to live a genuinely human life.

Sovereign power manifested itself under monarchy, according to Foucault, as the power to take life–that is, the power to kill. When monarchy gave way to more modern forms of rule, power asserted its sovereignty no longer as the power to take life by killing, but instead as power played out over life itself: what Foucault dubbed “biopower.”

Building upon Foucault, Foer’s essay can help us see that, in its final, least revocable, most ineradicable form, sovereignty vanishes even as direct power manifest over life as such. The final form of manifest power, the one Foer helps us see, perhaps began to break out openly in events at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse it signaled of the what it was once fashionable in certain circles to call “really existing communism.” What may only then have begun to break fully out into the open, however, had actually been developing and gathering steam below the surface for a long time before that, back at least to the American and French Revolutions.

At any rate, in its final, finalizing form, sovereign power–the power of sovereignty–no longer directly manifests either as power exercised over life itself, or as the power to take life by killing. It declares itself, rather, as the power to take, not life, but death. In its most self-fulfilling form, the power of sovereignty manifests by depriving its human subjects of their very ability to die.

That is the manifestation of ultimate power Foer’s remark points to: the power that deprives those it subjects to itself of their very capacity for death. It is the power that dis-ables us of our own deaths, reducing us to the twilight condition of no longer being able to die—and only as a consequence of our ability to live, rather than honestly and directing taking our lives at will, as under monarchy, or awarding us the resources and conditions for living, as under Foucault’s “biopower.”

It is “only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality,” to borrow Foer’s words, who “would deny the possibility” that the grandchildren of those who are attending graduation ceremonies today will no longer even be capable of dying. Indeed, it’s even possible, to paraphrase him, that many reading these very words as I post them will find themselves deprived of their own deaths. Indeed, that is more than possible. In fact, the common, global human condition today is already one in which the human being as such is robbed of her ability to die—and, thereby, stripped of her very humanity itself.

The fact that human beings have been robbed of their ability to die and thereby deprived of their very chance of truly being human, does not mean they can no longer be done in and die off, of course. They are being done in, and dying off, in ever growing droves. They are regularly being done in by the millions, and the numbers of those being voided continues to expand exponentially. The greater the human population grows, the greater grows the doing in and the dying off. Hitler and Stalin, not to mention such of their weak brothers as Pol Pot, Charles Taylor, or Slobodan Milošević, pale in comparison to the champion killers now at large world-wide—or at least globally (there being good grounds to question how much real “world,” if any, can survive the elimination of death in the ever rising tidal wave of exterminations). Wherever one turns, ever more and more people are simply being done away with.

Nowhere, however, are we allowed to come face to face with our own mortality. However, that means, in turn, that no possibility is granted for us, by confronting our own death, to be finally, gracefully brought to know–at the deepest level of ourselves and in the fullest sense of knowledge–that each and every one of us is finally, ineradicably alone, as each of us always is, can only be, and only can be, before death. Above all else, in the global “world” of today, no one can be permitted to be left–or let–alone. Come what may, that must never be permitted.

It is by no accident, then, the title the Times gave Foer’s brief essay in last Sunday’s op-ed pages was “How Not to Be Alone.” I’m pretty sure the editors at the Times, however, had no idea, when they selected that title, just how utterly appropriate it was. That’s because I’m just as sure that they were using ‘alone’ as a synonym for ‘lonely,’ rather than as its antonym, when they chose that title.

But Foer’s whole essay is a thoughtful exploration of how all the endless stream of endlessly updated electronic gadgets that have come to constitute the global environment today creates ever growing distance between us, assigning each of us to perpetual loneliness. In the very midst of all our Facebook “friends,” Linked-in “links,” and Twitter “followers,” all of whom belong to our ever expanding “network” via the “social media,” we find ourselves growing ever more lonely. The last mentioned—the “social media”–would, if we follow up on Foer’s suggestive analysis, be far less deceitfully called the a-social media, since they in fact chop at the very roots of any genuine society, any true social being together: “Contacts, contacts everywhere, but not a one contacted!”

Foer’s essay is a gentle but persistent call not to let all our social-media “connecting” totally dis-connect us from any further contact with one another. “Technology,” reads the editors’ blurb-insert to one side of his essay, “pushes us apart, so we must work harder to connect with others”–or with ourselves, we should add.

Against the appealing siren-song of technology, calling us into globally interconnected disconnection, Foer calls upon us, instead, to cultivate genuine connections by doing no more—but above all no less—than just simply, as our ongoing daily practice, listening to one another, attentive to one another’s needs. “Most of the time, most people are not crying in public,” he writes in the next to last paragraph of his piece, “but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy.” What’s more, he adds immediately, “[t]here is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.”

He then adds a remark that brings us clearly back to the focus on loneliness–and aloneness (or “solitude,” if Latin derivation is preferred)—by adding that “[t]here are as many ways” and opportunities to practice listening or attending to one another “as there are kinds of loneliness.” There are innumerably many of the latter, of course—at least as many as there are conceivable future internet connections.

Though Foer himself does not say so directly, if we listen attentively to what he does say himself (whether he knows it or not, by the way), we will hear that it is precisely because our technologies are so well designed perpetually to divert us from the fact that each and every one of us is finally, irreducibly alone, that the more “connected” we become with our contemporary technological environment, the more lonely we become. If we listen well to what he is saying, we will hear, however, that it is only alone that we can ever truly be together. Paradoxical as it may sound, all genuine community consists in being alone together, as we are, for example, whenever any two or more of us pray together in total silence—praying, perhaps, that we be taught again how to die.

It is only our own mortality itself that has the power to shock us into the silence of such prayer. In turn, it is only there, in that silence, that we can truly build community the only way it can be built—by, as Foer suggests, practicing that simplest and therefore most difficult of all human things: listening attentively to one another.

That is truly the gift of our death itself, as Foer himself clearly knows–and says, to those who listen, in the closing lines of his Times piece, when he writes: “Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.”

As always, the real horror lies not in trauma itself, even the trauma of death itself, come in person at last—or of birth, for that matter. It lies, coiling itself ever more tightly around us, in the avoidance of trauma.

The horror is not that we will die, but that, increasingly, we can’t.

Trauma and Intoxication: Pain and Narcosis (2)

Pain and Narcosis (2)

“No claim . . . is more certain than the one pain has on life.”  Ernst Jünger writes in On Pain (page 13 of the English translation), just a few pages after observing that in sensing the inescapability of pain, “the uncertainty and vulnerability of life as a whole,” we immediately try “to turn [our] sights to a space removed from the unlimited rule and prevailing power of pain.”  When we find no such space already carved out for us—no readily accessible womb of bliss and security to which we might return at will–we continue to try to delude ourselves about the very possibility of eluding pain.  Whence come not only flights into purely imaginary paradises where there is no more pain, but also the turn to medicinal and pharmacological means, all the various narcotic substances both natural and artificially synthesized, to numb or narcotize ourselves.  No less narcotizing—indeed, it may well be the most universally and easily accessible narcotic of them all—is “the biased belief that reason can conquer pain” (page 10), if only we can fund the relevant research well and long enough to discover the “cure.”   This blind faith in reason’s capacity eventually to free us from pain is a faith that itself alone already serves to blind us to that same pain, numbing us to it.  It is a faith, writes Jünger (still page 10), that is “not only a characteristic feature of forces allied with the Enlightenment,” but “has also produced a long series of practical measures typical for the human spirit of the past century” (written in the early 1930s, which means that it is drawing toward two centuries, now, in 2013).  Jünger then gives some examples.  One is “the abolition of torture and the slave trade,” or at least what we even today would still like to believe to be their abolition–if not everywhere then at least in some privileged places (such as the United States, if not Guantanamo), and at least for some privileged persons.  Other examples include:  “the discovery of electricity,”or, more recently, of gene-codes, perhaps;  “vaccination against measles,” or against polio, or even the flu; “narcosis,” in the sense of modern pharmacological opioid analgesics; “the system of insurance,” that is, today, financial insurance against everything but insurance itself (unless that too is covered now, and I am just ignorant of the fact); “and a whole world of technical and political conveniences”–today, from airplanes to the Web, balloting to the Sequester to the UN Security Council.

Today no less than eighty years ago, when Jünger wrote On Pain, we—at least those of us such as myself, who are among those segments of global population that most directly participate in, and benefit from, such institutionalizations of the avoidance of pain—are “[b]orn in full enjoyment of all these blessings,” which are for us “now taken for granted.”  However, as Jüger immediately adds, the reality remains that “all this is thoroughly fairytale-like and reflects a sordid world in which the semblance of security is preserved in a string of hotel foyers,” while simultaneously everywhere “barbarity” is lurking just beneath the surface, or just around the corner.  Thus, he writes, our world today “resemble[s] an archipelago where an isle of vegetarians exists right next to an island of cannibals.  An extreme pacifism side by side with an enormous intensification of war preparations, luxurious prisons next to squalid quarters for the unemployed, the abolition of capital punishment by day whilst the Whites and the Reds cut each others throats by night,” as Nazis and Communists did in the streets of Germany during the inter-war period when Jünger first wrote those words.

Such public, officially endorsed illusions of “security” are purchased at the price of marginalizing pain “in favor of a run-of-the-mill complacency,” as J ünger says in a passage I quoted near the close of my preceding post.”  It is in that same passage that Jünger calls the system generating such illusory security a “spatial economy,” insofar as it marks out what it proffers as places of supposed safety from otherwise ubiquitous pain.  “Alongside this spatial economy,” as he adds in that passage, “there is a temporal one, consisting of the sum of pain that remains unclaimed and amasses as hidden capital accruing compound interest.”  Thus, the pain we seek to avoid through recourse to such illusions of security does not go away; it just keeps growing.  Far from diminishing in its threatening quality, he concludes the passage, “[t]he threat grows with every artificial increase in the barrier separating [us] from the elemental forces,” as Jünger calls them, those forces to which our ineradicable vulnerability—literally, our capacity for being wounded—always continue to expose us, despite all our efforts to bar their way to us.

Such illusions will not last forever.  Eventually they will all fail.  Then all the compounded pain we have so long been avoiding finally bursts through the bounds within which we have sought to contain it, floods into and over us.  When that happens, as it inevitably will—then what are we to do, as I asked at the end of my preceding post?

Well, what can we do, then? At that point, there is no longer anything we can do.  All we can do is—nothing!  At last, when we are at that last point of all, then that is precisely the only thing we have left to do:  Nothing.

There is nothing, however, harder to do than that–nothing.  Accordingly, we try time and again not to do nothing, but instead to do something–anything, other than that (than nothing).  Each time, of course, we fail again.  Regardless of just what we may choose to do, we just make things worse, since doing anything is doing the wrong thing, when all that remains to be done is nothing.  If we are to avoid that, avoid just making things worse, then we have to stop avoiding what all our doing itself is designed to avoid.  That means we have to stop avoiding the inevitable, which is to say un-avoidable (“inevitable”:  from Latin in-, as indicating negation, and evitablilis, from evitare, “avoid”), pain that comes our way–and always will come our way, despite all our efforts to avoid it.

At that point, where we stop doing anything and start doing nothing, we stop running from pain and, in effect, start simply staying with it.  Accordingly, at that point everything shifts.  “Henceforth,” to borrow a way of putting it from Jünger himself (page 16), “all measures are designed . . . not to avoid” pain by “marginalizing pain and sheltering life from it,” but, rather, “incessantly to stay in contact with pain.”

That does not mean to aggravate the pain, to add to it.  That, after all, is precisely what all the endeavors to secure ourselves against pain have ended up doing.  What counts, rather, is to acquire, and then to keep on exercising, a capacity to remain calmly with our pain, remain in it.   In a word, what we need is a proper detachment toward our own pain—a detachment that is itself what allows us not to lapse back into trying to insulate ourselves against pain, to isolate ourselves from it.

During the period of the early 1930s when Jünger wrote On Pain, his own thought was still moving within the circuit of Nietzsche’s, and most especially of what the latter called “active nihilism,” and proposed as the only viable response to nihilism itself, which Nietzsche saw as the problem that contemporary humanity had to face.  Accordingly, in On Pain itself Jünger interpreted the notion of cultivating the attitude of detachment that ceases trying to avoid pain, and instead seeks constantly to stay in contact with it, in “heroic” terms.  Thus, he writes that, once one bottoms out, as it were, on the attempt to avoid pain, and finds one’s way to an alternative, fruitful response to pain’s inevitability, all the efforts one had been expending to secure oneself against pain come to be directed instead toward mastering pain.  Then the point is no longer (page 16) “marginalizing pain and sheltering life from it.”  Rather, he goes on (pages 16-17),

the point is to integrate pain and organize life in such a way that one is always armed against it.  .  .  .  Indeed, [now] discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly-ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike-heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel.  In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling.

However, by the end of the 1960s, when he wrote Approaches:  Drugs and Intoxication, basing that work on his own lifelong experimentation with various narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs, Jünger had at least arguably grown into seeing his own earlier “active nihilism” as itself part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.  After World War II–which in his novel Eumeswil, published even later (1977) than Approaches (1970), Jünger himself characterized as embodying “the final triumph of the technician over the warrior”—he dropped the imagery and terminology of “heroism” and “mastery.”  In fact, even in On Pain, immediately after the remark about the goal being to maintain “complete control,” he already went on to observe (page 17) that, when it came to such matters of detachment “[e]xertions of the will are in particular insufficient,” because “[o]ne cannot just artificially cultivate a ‘heroic worldview’ or proclaim it ex cathedra.”  Then, in a remark anticipating by thirty-five years Heidegger’s posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel magazine entitled “Only a God Can Save Us,” Jünger notes (page 18) that “the advent of a god is independent of human effort.”

Be that as it may, and regardless of whether it is articulated in terms of “active nihilism” or in less “heroic” terms, the key contrast remains.  That is the contrast between two different sorts of “numbness” or “narcosis,” as it were.  The first is narcosis in the service of an ultimately fruitless and counterproductive attempt to attain immunity against pain.  The second is narcosis in service to a very different end, that of ceasing to flee pain, and instead remaining with it.  To borrow an expression the popular Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh has used in speaking of anger (a rather painful, or at least agitating, emotion after all, as Aristotle already taught millennia ago), this second sort of narcosis aims to “cherish” pain, “like a baby.”  It is that second sort of narcosis that I have called “the narcosis of recovery,” in contrast to “the narcosis of avoidance.”

In both forms of narcosis, pain remains.  However, it is only in the first form, that of the narcosis of avoidance, that pain remains the master.  In what I read as the greater wisdom Jünger displays in his later works than in his earlier ones, in the second form of narcosis, that of recovery, there is no longer any master, or further need of mastery.

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This completes my two-post sequence on “Pain and Narcosis,” which is itself part of my longer series entitled “Trauma and Intoxication,” which will continue in my next post.

Trauma and Intoxication: Pain and Narcosis (1)

Pain and Narcosis (1)

Pain hurts.  So we try to avoid it.  If we can’t avoid it altogether, as none of us can forever, then when it inevitably does come our way we try to numb ourselves against feeling it.  Narcotics are good for that, which is why we call them “narcotics,” from narkosis, Greek for “numbness.”

It is worth noting that numbness is also one side of the definitive, two-sided psychic “effect” of trauma, according to Freud, on the psyche—the other side being the compulsion to repeat the traumatic event.  The traumatized need take no drugs to achieve narcosis.  The numbness comes right along with the trauma, no additional drug taking required.

However, there is narcosis–and then there is narcosis.  Trauma-induced numbness is one kind.  Sometimes, drug-induced numbness can also be of that same kind.  However, the narcosis induced by taking narcotics or their equivalents can also be numbness of a sort very different from that induced by trauma.

The difference at issue is less a matter of the felt quality of the numbness as such than it is of the end to which the numbing is dedicated within the total context of its occurrence –the underlying purpose it serves, the telos or end toward which it is directed and which “animates” it:  its intention, in the phenomenological sense.  There is, on the one hand, the narcosis that belongs to the flight from pain.  On the other hand, there is the narcosis that continues to hold the pain close, at the very heart of the numbness itself, as it were.  Instead of belonging to the endeavor to avoid pain, as is the first sort of narcosis just mentioned, this second sort of narcosis belongs to the enterprise of engaging with the pain, in effect, in an ongoing effort to recover in the face of it.  Accordingly, I will call the first sort of narcosis the narcosis of avoidance, and the second, the narcosis of recovery.

The narcosis of avoidance invariably worsens the pain, most dramatically and visibly in exponentially increasing the violence and devastation with which pain lays waste to whatever it touches, making it into ever more wasting pain, as we say.  “The wasteland grows,” to borrow Nietzsche’s famous line–and the narcosis of avoidance both sows the seed and harvests the bounty of that growth.

Many others besides Nietzsche have written about the underlying phenomenon at issue.  That includes Ernst Jünger, who wrote about it in several places, one of them being his essay “Vom Schmerz,” originally published in 1934 in German and available in English as On Pain (New York:  Telos Press Publishing, 2008–translated by Peter C. Durst).

Early in the essay Jünger indirectly approaches the all too natural, universally human tendency to try to draw back from pain and avoid it, by beginning with a remark about our experience when we find ourselves in places or situations which, despite our efforts, remind us of the inescapability of pain in our lives.  Thus, he begins by making an unexpected remark about archaeology, of all things.  “Archaeology,” he writes (p. 7 in the English translation), “is actually a science dedicated to pain; in the layers of the earth, it uncovers empire after empire, of which we no longer even know the names.”  Etymologically, the word archaeology means the science (in Greek, logos) of beginnings (plural from the Greek arche); and Jünger’s remark resonates with an at least double sense, which emerges when we go on to read his immediately following remark, which unexpectedly calls our attention to the sense of sadness and loss that can affect us when we find ourselves—physically or only mentally, it makes no difference—at the site of an archaeological “dig” unearthing the buried remains from some long ago forgotten human community.  “The mourning that takes hold of us at such sites,” as he writes of such sadness, “is extraordinary.”  In thus forcefully reminding us of how transitory are all human endeavors, even those that once established empires, the sense of mourning that can strike us at such archaeological sites confronts us with an even deeper arche or source of human habitation than that revealed in even the most ancient strata of physical remains.  It reminds us, with a reminder that is itself all too painful, of how for all of us, regardless of how privileged and fortunate, our life itself begins in pain—and ends there, too.

Our mourning at such sites ultimately above all testifies, perhaps most painfully of all, to the futility of every endeavor to build ourselves some lasting place of safety, secure against the pain that loss inevitably brings us all.  As Jünger writes a bit later in the same early section of On Pain (p. 9), the human eye “naturally searches for spaces of shelter and safety at the sight of pain so inescapable and antithetical to [human] values.  In sensing the uncertainty and vulnerability of life as a whole, [one] increasingly needs to turn [one’s] sights to a space removed from the unlimited rule and power of pain.”

That all such searching is doomed to be in vain is what the mourning we can come all too easily to feel in such situations as that of visiting an archaeological dig insistently reminds us, revealing yet again to us the illusory nature of all our endeavors to find a place secure from pain.  What we feel in such situations puts the lie, as Jünger goes on to note in his very next section (on p. 10), to “the biased belief that reason can conquer pain.”

The belief that, somehow, somewhere, there is a place secure from pain, if only we can find our way there, is nothing new.  It, too, has been there almost from the very beginning.  It is almost as archaic as pain itself—the pain against which the belief in safety itself first arose as a reaction.  It is, as Jünger himself observes right after noting its bias, “a characteristic feature of forces allied with the Enlightment,” at the start of the modern epoch.  Not only that, “but it has also produced a long series of practical measures typical for the human spirit of the past century”—which means, given when Jünger first wrote that line, for going on two centuries now, back to the middle of the nineteenth.  Jünger then gives as examples “—to name just a few—the abolition of torture and the slave trade, the discovery of electricity, vaccination against measles, narcosis [my emphasis—at issue is the discovery of the narcotic drugs that ever since their discovery have remained at the center of the modern medical techniques of “pain management,” as we’ve long ago grown accustomed to calling it:  what I have above labeled “the narcosis of avoidance”], the system of insurance, and a whole world of technical and political conveniences.”

Lest his intent be misunderstood, Jünger hastens to add that, of course,  “[w]e still appreciate all these celebrated dates of progress.”  He even goes on to remark that “whenever one, let’s say, mocks them, it is due to a romantic dandyism, which flatters itself haughtily as a finer spirit amidst a boundlessly democratic lifestyle”—a sort of John Galt or other Ayn Rand hero come to haunt us before his time, perhaps.

Nevertheless, Jünger goes on to observe, although we who were “[b]orn in full enjoyment of all these blessings,” and for whom they are “now taken for granted,” many things give us pause.  At a time when “the War” meant what we have since come to think of as the First World War, the butchery of which is itself second to that of the far more deadly Second World War, Jünger writes (still on p. 10), in words that, if anything, fit better today than they did back then, in the 1930s:

Since the War’s end, the denial of pain as a necessary facet of life has experienced a later revival.  These years display a strange mix of barbarity and humanity; they resemble an archipelago where an isle of vegetarians exists right next to an island of cannibals.  An extreme pacifism side by side with an enormous intensification of war preparations, luxurious prisons next to squalid quarters for the unemployed, the abolition of capital punishment by day whilst the Whites [read, right-wingers] and the Reds [left-wingers] cut each other’s throats by night—all this is thoroughly fairytale-like and reflects a sordid world in which the semblance of security is preserved in a string of hotel foyers.

No matter how hard we try to avoid it, and struggle to convince ourselves that we still share the Enlightenment’s faith in progress, we never truly manage to escape the deep, unarguable claim that pain has on all of us.  “No claim,” as Jünger bluntly reminds us a few pages later (p. 13), “is more certain than the one that pain has on life.”  He immediately continues:

Where people are spared pain, social stability is produced according to the laws of a very specific economy, and, by a turn of phrase, one can speak of a ‘cunning of pain’ [against Hegel’s celebration, itself often celebrated, of what Hegel calls ‘the cunning of reason’—which cunning becomes sheer stupidity in comparison to that of pain] that never fails to reach its aim.  At the sight of this state of widespread comfort [we might think, for example, of the not-to-be-disturbed comforts of homeland Americans during the still-ongoing wars unleashed under President Bush after September 11, 2001], one is prompted to ask immediately where the burden is borne.  As a rule, one will not have to go far to uncover the pain.  Indeed, even the individual is not free from pain in this joyful state of security.  The artificial check on the elementary forces might be able to prevent violent clashes and to ward off shadows, but it cannot stop the dispersed light with which pain permeates life.

In short, pain will out.

For Americans such as myself, who continue to experience the comforts of home, not struck personally, at least not directly, by the violence of America’s current and recent wars–nor even, in my own and similar cases, by the even more pervasively wasting violence unleashed by the economic collapse of 2008 –it can be sobering to read a remark Jünger goes on to make just a few pages later (on p. 15).  There, he writes that those who possess “a mind incapable of differentiating between war and murder or crime and disease will definitely select in territorial struggles the safest and most pitiful method of killing.”  (Readers like me might think today of drones, for example.)  Shameful as such mental incapacity may be, it certainly has its appeal!  After all, such blindness fosters a most comforting sense of security in those who “suffer” from it.

However, as Jünger goes on to write:

The nature of this security . . . lies in the fact that pain is marginalized in favor of a run-of-the-mill complacency.  Alongside the spatial economy, there is a temporal one, consisting of the sum of pain that remains unclaimed and amasses as hidden capital accruing compound interest.  The threat grows with every artificial increase in the barrier separating man from the elementary forces.

Unfortunately for all of us so far blissfully blind folk, there is no force more elementary than pain, and, as I remarked just a moment ago, pain will out.  Inevitably, the scales will eventually be ripped even from our eyes–and, as Jünger’s ominous last, just-quoted sentence warns us, the longer the blindness lasts, the greater grows the pain that will come to us all, eventually, when our vision clears.

Then what are we to do?

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 I will try to address—or at least to begin to address—that question in the next post in this series on “Trauma and Intoxication.”

The End of an Interlude — The Traffic in Trauma: Forcing Rudeness/Enforcing Consumption/Enclosing Stampede

This post concludes my two-part “interlude” to my series on “Trauma and Intoxication,” to which I will return in my next post—which will not be until sometime after the beginning of next year.

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Trying to walk along the Vegas Strip, routed into and through one casino after another along the slow, crowded way, the pedestrian is subjected to a non-stop barrage of aggressive solicitations.  Outstretched hands thrust stiff, glossy advertising cards for “escort” services upon one, with soft-core pictures of alluring, available young women, each time one enters or exits any of the casinos one finds oneself in turn thrust into and drawn out of as one walks.  One’s feet tromp over the young, pretty faces as one goes, since the ground is already strewn with the refuse discarded by earlier passers-by.  One follows suit, and adds one’s own contribution to the litter, if not with such “escort” titillations then with the flyers, cards, or pamphlets hawking other wares, from eats to funhouse rides, theatrical performances to manicures, to real estate, to burial plans, to various drugs delivered by various delivery systems.  As one walks along one is recurrently urged to indulge all one’s rawest appetites–especially those one never even knew one had till then, enticed to birth by all the opportunities being suddenly so obtrusively thrust upon one to give those appetites satisfaction.

Simultaneously, one is no less bombarded by appeals to help those less fortunate than oneself.  Along with the hands of the “escort” promoters and other pimps trying to grab one by whatever vices one may have or they can give, other hands reach out as well, pleading and beseeching help–by way of donations on behalf of the homeless, the addicted, the lost, the abused, the disabled—for all our consumer society’s damned, damaged, and depleted.

Thus, the walker is pulled in two affectively opposite directions at once.  One set of imploring hands outrageously tempts and titillates one to indulge one’s lowest appetites.  At the same time, another set of hands yanks at one’s sense of moral responsibility and aspirations to generosity.  The all but inevitable result, which occurs at levels of the self little amenable to conscious deliberation and intention, is to awaken a deep-seated sense of fundamental, and fundamentally un-assuage-able, guilt.

First, there is guilty shame for even feeling the strong pull toward abandoning one’s own moral inhibitions (whether the sense of them being “one’s own” is somehow existentially authentic, or wholly socially constructed, makes no difference, since either way the shame and guilt are felt the same).  Inextricably intertwined with that goes guilt for one’s own perceived prosperity, relative to all those obviously less prosperous than oneself, and whose conditions cries out for help.  Thus, one’s own “good fortune” is turned against one.  To use a term more appropriate to Las Vegas, one’s own “good luck” is cast in one’s face, to one’s shame and guilt–all one’s good luck relative to all the bad luck that has struck all those socially outcast and downtrodden for whom one’s donation is being no less solicited as one walks along the Vegas Strip than is one’s abandonment to all those sins for being the city of which Las Vegas celebrates—or at least advertises–itself.

My own reaction to having my chains pulled in two different directions that way, choking me off even more tightly that usual, as my wife and I first tried to walk the Las Vegas Strip, was, I think, not uncommon:  Growing irritation.  At first, I tried to maintain some semblance of politeness, as I turned down one salacious or solemn solicitation after another.  I smiled and said “No, thank you!”  Then as the assaults continued I began to omit the “No, thank you!” and just waived all the proffered hands off with my own hand, but still accompanied that gesture of refusal with a slight smile.  That, in turn, was soon replaced by only the gesture of waiving away with added no smile to soften the rejection.  After yet another brief while, as my irritation continued to mount, I simply did my best to ignore the solicitations altogether.  Locking my eyes straight ahead, I tried to walk as though oblivious of them all, most definitely including those that implored me to give to the deserving needy.  That, of course, only added to my sense of guilt, now for being so callous as to lump the disabled with the pernicious–which in turn increased my irritation, which hardened what I perceived as my own rudeness, which gave me more guilt, which made me more irritable yet, and so on, round and down the sewer-tending spiral.

All of which put me, of course, just where the sunny City of Sin would have me be:  in a thoroughly agitated place–and, therefore, primed to spend.  On what I spent, mattered not at all, really, just so long as I spent on something (or on nothing at all, so far as that goes).   So long as I just kept spending, I was dutifully playing my part, which is the part of the good consumer.  After all, in our contemporary global market society–consumer-based “to a fault,” to use a duplicitously apt expression, most especially apt today, when I post this, poised as we in the United States currently are to go over the ostensibly officially dreaded “fiscal cliff”—all that really counts, as we are so often reminded by all the “authorities,” is to keep the current of currency flowing, the consumer-expenditures expended in consumption.  On that, the health of the entire system depends, however much of a disease that entire system itself may be.

It may make a difference to “escorts” and their pimps, or morticians and theirs, and so on down the line of businesses and their human sales-resources, just where one “spends” oneself–that is, puts into re-circulation any money that spends time in one’s own spending-pocket.  However, to the business in general that was once famously—or infamously—said to be, among other things, America’s business, it doesn’t matter where one spends one’s spending.  All that matters is that it be spent.  “Cast your fate to the winds!” as an old saying goes.  Since in our society our fates are a function of how much money we make, that becomes “Cast your money to the winds!”–any winds, just so long you cast it, and keep casting it.

In Vegas, one is forced to be rude.  The only alternative to being rude is being taken, and feeling like a fool once one realizes that that’s what’s happened.  Be rude, or be robbed!  That is the Vegas option.

Except it is really no option at all.  That’s because, as I’ve been trying to show, forced into rudeness, one will only find oneself set up to be robbed more surely.  While I’m diverted by rudely pushing away the hands thrust into my face, other hands are busy behind my back picking my pocket.  What’s worse, so far as I can tell my pockets are not being picked at all.  Instead, I’m emptying them voluntarily, and am even convinced I’m enjoying the process.  While assaulting me, my assailant has managed to convince me that I’m not being assaulted at all.  Rather, I am a willing participant.  It’s not rape—it’s consensual sex!

Sure it is.

At any rate, once sensitized to the mechanism at work in forcing pedestrians into rudeness—the method to that apparent Las Vegas madness—I began to see it at work in other phenomena as well.  For one thing, I was stuck by how everything is set up in Las Vegas to encourage good old-fashioned gluttony—or, to use less Medieval terminology, recurrent overeating.  It is easy to put on weight in Las Vegas, especially by eating in the buffets that are ubiquitous there.  Such dining places are designed to tempt one to pig-out on all the goodies available, for example by trying out at least a few of all the different, delicious looking deserts that are always offered in such places.  Most of the casinos/hotels offer discounts or even dine-free passes to their affiliated buffets, and such offers are customary in a variety of others scams being continually run on visitors to Sin City, just as they were part of the package my wife and I received “at no charge”—save that of our dignity and sense of decency—just for taking a brief bus trip and undergoing a (not so) brief sales pitch for some sleazy time-share.

It should really come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that everywhere one looks in Las Vegas, one sees, to put it crudely (which means appropriately in this case), fat people.   In a nation that is already faced–as we are constantly reminded by the media, the government, “health-care” workers, and other fonts of information–with “an epidemic of obesity,” Las Vegas is once again surfs ahead of the wave.

That was evident to me when my wife and I visited there—and added our own overweight selves to the scale:  Two of the fat people we saw in Las Vegas were ourselves.  What’s more, not only was it enough just to look at one another to see fat people in Las Vegas.  All either of us had to do, to see a fatty, was to look in the mirror.

That in turn, is all but impossible not to do in Las Vegas:  look at oneself in the mirror.  In Las Vegas, one doesn’t have to be a narcissist to find oneself riveted before one’s own image.  That’s because it’s not only casino’s and pimps and overweight people who are everywhere in Las Vegas.  So are mirrors.  One cannot escape one’s image, in Las Vegas.

When I combined seeing all the mirrors with seeing all the encouragements to indulge gluttony, for an instant it struck me as making no “casino-sense,” so to speak, to insist on constantly reminding people how fat and unattractive they looked in a mirror, and at the same time to prod them non-stop to stuff still more food in their already obviously overstuffed mouths.  But a moment’s reflection let me quickly see the logic at work.  Once again, it is the same old story of the spiral of addictive and/or compulsive behavior:  The negative affect one’s own addictive or compulsive behavior elicits in one becomes itself a yet stronger impetus to perform yet more of that very same behavior:  The shame of alcoholics over their own drinking behavior just gives them more reason to drink; the self-loathing compulsive overeaters feel when they look at their own image in a mirror can only be assuaged by food; and so on.

So it makes perfectly good sense, from the wholly non-sensical perspective of “Las Vegas”–that is, of our own contemporary society as a whole, for which Las Vegas serves as an emblematic symbol—to push food upon people in restaurants and then to show them just how fat and ugly they are when they get up and leave once their binging has ended, at least for a little while.  That just guarantees, as effectively as it can be guaranteed, that they’ll follow the admonition to “Come back soon!”  They will do so—and often.

At work in all such cases is precisely the same principle that Mr. Burkeman laid bare pertaining to holiday retailing strategy, in his Sunday New York Times column of December 12 of this year:  What counts is not customer satisfaction, but customer agitation, as I put it before.

To sum up so far, then:  Forcing rudeness is an effective way of enforcing consumption.  That takes care of the first two parts of my three-part subtitle to this two-part interlude to my discussion of “trauma and intoxication.”  But what about the third and final part of my subtitle?  That is, what about enclosing stampede?

Well, to state the point as a thesis, using the three terms of my subtitle:  Forcing rudeness is and remains in the service of enforcing consumption only if the stampede set in motion by the former–or by any other mode of agitating consumers so that they will consume all the more—is properly enclosed within certain limits, those set by the underlying conditions of the global market system as such.  That is, if consumer-agitation is to stay directly proportional to consumption, so that they rise together, that agitation must be properly contained (“properly” from the perspective of, for, and through the economic system:  i.e., “profitable,” that itself taken in the sense of “filthy lucre,” of course).  Once again, the analogy to a washing machine is helpful.  Were the agitation of dirty clothes in water not held within the confines of the washing machine itself, it would not serve to clean the clothes of dirt, but would just throw them around to gather more dirt, or rip them apart.  In the same way, to serve the consumption -based economic system for cleaning consumers out of all their filthy lucre, consumer-agitation must be kept properly within the limits of that system itself.

Thus, for the good of the system what above all must not under any circumstances be allowed ever to happen is for the stampeding herd of agitated consumers, such as the mobs of those who compete viciously with one another over the stuff put on sale on Black Friday, to break out of all constraints and just run free.  As Mr. Burkeman’s observations in the recent Sunday Times make clear, today the herders have discovered that stampedes are really not disruptive annoyances for their herding ventures, to be avoided if possible.  Instead, they are, when properly contained, indispensible devices of herding itself, at the highest levels, with potential for the greatest yield.  Stampedes belong to super-herding, in effect.

Las Vegas provides a model for the profit-proper enclosure of stampedes.  The agitation of consumers by forcing them into rudeness, for instance, is carefully contained there.  In an earlier post in this occasional series on “The Traffic in Trauma,” the same series to which this post today itself belongs, I already wrote about how true it is that, as an already now clichéd advertising slogan for the city says, what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vega.  I pointed out that the truth of that remark is beyond doubt, precisely because nothing ever happens in Las Vegas.  There’s no room for anything to happen in Las Vegas, as I said then, because every inch is already filled—filled with scams and scammers of all imaginable varieties, diversions of every conceivable sort:  all sorts of opportunities to spend one’s spendings, whatever they are.  That is also exemplified by what I’ve written about in today’s post–how every inch of sidewalk along the Strip, filled as it is by pimps of all kinds pimping all kinds of zero-good goods, offers no room for anything but even more spending–which really never needs, and, more importantly, never leaves, any room at all.

Regardless of hotel vacancy rates, there’s never any room at the inn in Las Vegas.  Unfortunately for mere managed herd members (but all to the good for their managing herders), there are no mangers there, either.  The glittering, overfilled emptiness of Las Vegas is an altogether empty emptiness.  It leaves no room anywhere, room where something, anything, might happen—something such as, for example, a triggered agitation passing over into something else, no longer of service to the system that triggered it, but instead a threat to the very foundations of that system.  (Something such as, perhaps, a truly uncontrollable riot–an Arab Spring in Las Vegas!  Now that’s an intoxicating thought!)

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My own thoughts will return to intoxication, and its interconnections with trauma, in my next post.

A Two-Part Interlude — The Traffic in Trauma: Forcing Rudeness/Enforcing Consumption/Enclosing Stampede

I have decided to interrupt my series, “Trauma and Intoxication”–inspired by my recent reading of Annäherungen,  Ernst Jünger’s 1970 book on “drugs and intoxication”—to do this two-part interlude.  I’ll resume my series on traumatic intoxications and intoxicating traumas with my post after next.  I hope the delay in my turning to pain–which, as promised, will be where I start when I eventually resume my Jünger-inspired series–will turn to no undue pain of their own for my readers.

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A piece in the editorial section of the New York Times last Sunday (12/9/12) reminded me of the visit to Las Vegas my wife and I took last spring, a trip I have blogged about before.  The piece was by Oliver Burkeman, identified by the editor as a columnist for The Guardian.  It appeared under the headline:  “Suffer.  Spend.  Retreat.”  The side-blurb,  “Holiday shopping is designed to make you uncomfortable,” did a good job of pointing to what the column addresses:  How what counts in the retail business when it comes to shoppers and their shopping is not to please customers, but to agitate them, like a washing machine.

That analogy to a washing machine is mine, not Mr. Burkeman’s; but it certainly fits.  A washing machine is not in the business of catering to the fancies of the clothes that are thrown into it.  It is in the business of washing them—of cleaning them out of all the filth that they have accumulated since their last washing.  Just so is holiday retailing (or that of any other season, for that matter) designed not to boost shoppers’ egos, but to boost their wallets of whatever money they may have managed to accumulate since they were last boosted.  As washing machines clean clothes of filth, so retailers clean shoppers of their money, their “filthy lucre.”  The business of the such business is not to fluff shoppers, but to fleece them.  To do that effectively, moneyed shoppers, like dirtied clothes, must be agitated:  The greater the agitation, the deeper the potential fleecing.

Mr. Burkeman’s analysis of the principles governing contemporary retail sales reinforces a similar analysis of another business field, namely, contemporary banking, by professional market analyst Richard X.  Bove, that was already recounted in the Times back in July of this year, this time in a column in the business section, by Nathaniel Popper.  I have already blogged about Mr. Popper’s column presenting Mr. Bove’s analysis, and interested readers can refer to that earlier post.  It appears at this site under the same general, “occasional series” title I have chosen as appropriate also to today’s post:  “ The Traffic in Trauma.”  That earlier post carries the subtitle, “Legitimations?  Legitimations?  We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Legitimations!”   That same subtitle would also be pertinent to some of what is at issue in today’s post, too.

In its turn, that earlier post under “The Traffic in Trauma” was, in common with the whole occasional series of that general title, occasioned by my wife’s and my trip to Las Vegas last May, as my regular readers may remember.  On my notes to myself during that trip, when the idea of such an occasional series–devoted to what I also call the institutionalization of trauma–first came to me, I jotted down, as one possibility under the general title at issue, a post on “Forcing Rudeness,” an idea which has now found its way into my subtitle for today’s post.  It is to that topic, and the trip to Las Vegas that provided its biographical context, that I will now turn.

As my wife and I experienced and discussed between the two of us during our trip there last spring, it is not possible to walk the Vegas Strip (the Las Vegas part of Las Vegas, as it were) without walking within and/or through the various casinos along the way.  All pedestrian traffic is inexorably directed into and/or through them.  I’ve already remarked on that at this blog-site before. Wherever one goes in the Vegas of the Strip, one goes either within or through one casino and/or another–take your pick which, since they’re all alike anyway, just as all the products competing with one another in our “consumer society” are all alike, just under a bunch of different brand names (maybe most owned by the same business conglomerate).

What I have not till now blogged about until now is how, coupled with that recurrent, ubiquitous casino-entrapment, the pedestrian is also recurrently harassed unto rudeness, as I would put it, all along both the intra- and the inter-casino stretches of a walk there.  We were left un-accosted during our arrival at the Las Vegas airport and even during our shuttle-bus ride to the casino-hotel where we had booked a room for our stay.  But then, literally as soon as we entered the doors into the belly of the beast, before we could even visually locate the registration desk to check in, the assault began.  Approached just inside the doorway by a be-suited, clean-shaven, well-groomed man we took to be part of the hotel welcoming staff and who inquired if he could be of help, we asked him the way to check-in.  He offered not only to tell us, but also to accompany us there in person.  Duped by his apparent solicitude, we gladly accepted his offer, and set off with him.

Our guide did indeed prove to be solicitous.  It is just that his care was not for us, but for the potential profit we represented to him—or, rather, to the enterprise whose morning’s minion (pace G. M. Hopkins, who also has a place in Las Vegas for me, as some of my readers may recall) he was.  In that sense, there was even something self-less about his service, since his own interests were entirely subordinated to those of the firm or enterprise that employed him, and into which everything of whatever might have been his “self” had all but vanished.  That selflessness, however, was that of the walking dead, rather than that of one who, as St. Benedict recommends to his monks, was ever zealous to seek the good of others rather than of his own—the emptiness of the zero, rather than of the womb:  a place where nothing can grow, save the wasteland.

Frontline combat veterans sent to the rear with what was once called “battle fatigue” were also once said symptomatically to display “the thousand-yard-stare.”  The assault of being in Las Vegas can produce the same sort of emptiness behind the eyes of those who spend time there, on the frontlines of our consumer society as it were.  We might call that “the Las Vegas stare.”

That empty, frozen stare is something one can see, of course, in the gambling addict’s fixation on the slot-machine, roulette wheel, velvet dice-roll surface, or other gaming equivalent.  One can also see it in the eyes of the homeless and the drug-addicted who are permitted to manifest on the Strip only during the deadness of early dawn, when the mass of tourists and gamblers are briefly off the streets, readying themselves to reenter the action by a bit of boozy, fretful sleep.  Even more significantly, one can see it even—and indeed especially, judging from my own, admittedly limited but still convincing experience—in the eyes of those who “make their living” in Las Vegas–make it in, on, and out of everything that itself makes up what I earlier called the truly Las Vegas part of Las Vegas, namely, the Strip.

Our helpful guide to what we presumed would be the hotel registration desk had the Las Vegas stare.  So did the woman to whom he guided us first, before taking us to the front desk, and who, he told us, would provide us with some tokens of welcome to Sin City, U. S. A., as Las Vegas likes to advertise itself.  One of the welcoming tokens that latter person, the friendly token-giver, gave to us was an offer to receive even more such generous—that is, more expensive—gifts than the trinkets she’d already given us,  if we would only agree to take a short bus trip to a nearby condominium development to be given to a standard “time-share” tour and spiel.  For just the short span of time it would take to do that, she told us, we would be given free meal tickets for breakfast, lunch or brunch at the hotel’s buffet restaurant, free tickets to dine one evening during our stay at a dinner theatre chosen from a brief list of such places, and free tickets to one of a number of public exhibitions around town.  In short, she appealed to our own base and basic greed in hopes of hooking us into a slick sales-pitch,  which in turn would, it was of course hoped, hook us into impulsively buying something we did not need, could not afford, and did not really want in the first place.

No less ample than in most other couples, our own greed was enough for us to take the bait, even though we knew better from earlier, equally basely greed-induced misadventures with time-share huckstering.  Once again, played upon through direct, intentional appeal our own greed, we yielded once again to temptation.  So we once again had to undergo the humiliating process involved in such matters, the humiliation that comes from feigning, out of motives we ourselves consider base, to have interests or feelings or thoughts or concerns we really do not have—in short, the humiliation that comes from knowingly violating our own best conscience, and becoming dishonest, in our own (often unconscious) assessment.  It is the humiliation that accompanies all such deliberate self-abuse, in the properly basic, non-euphemistic sense of that term—the sense that makes the self-abuser at one and the same time both victim and perpetrator.

Abuse by one’s own hand is no less still abuse.  And abuse traumatizes.  As Freud knew, one of the affects that goes with trauma, or at least one of the expressions of the affect that goes with it, is numbing, denying, distancing–in short, shutting down, as in shock–in the face of the trauma.  That let’s one survive, to be sure; but only as benumbed.   If the numbing goes deep enough, which can occur through repetition or intensity of the trauma, one thus develops the empty stare that goes with numbness—“the thousand-mile-stare” of the frontline veteran suffering from “combat fatigue,” or what I’ve just labeled “the Las Vegas stare.”

Because it makes no difference, when it comes to developing such a stare, where the abuse that elicits it comes from, whether oneself, others, or an inextricable tangle of both (as in the Nazi camps or even in a typical, everyday scam like time-share huckstering), that stare is equally common among both victims and abusers.   Let oneself get greed-hooked into going to enough super-hyped time-share presentations, and one will develop that vacant, far-away stare; but so will those who–no doubt most often for far better motives, chief among which is the desire to support oneself and one’s family–get hooked into having to make a living by selling goods of questionable good, and/or by selling good goods through questionable means.  For example, the time-share saleswoman who drew our names when my wife and I degraded ourselves by going to yet another time-share presentation in Las Vegas last spring, was a nice, likeable, obviously intelligent, attractive-looking, middle-aged mother.  She had come to Las Vegas in her youth, with dreams of becoming a showgirl.  Then she had fallen in love and married there, and had children.  The demands of family life soon forced her to abandon her showgirl ambitions to find a more reliable, steady way to help support herself and her family.  By an unkind irony, she had ended up in her present position, which required her, in effect, to prostitute her own performing talents and dreams by hawking overpriced time-shares to greed-crazed consumers like us.  She was caught in a cycle no less vicious—though perhaps less often visibly so–than that of heroin addicts “on the nod.”

That brings me back to “the Las Vegas stare,” and, to the conditions designed, in operation if not in intention, to call it forth.  Thought of those conditions brings me back, in turn, to what I referred to above as “forced rudeness”—specifically, to how the management of pedestrian traffic along the Las Vegas Strip is designed, intentionally or unconsciously, to force pedestrians to become rude.

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My next post will conclude this two-part interlude to my discussion of “Trauma and Intoxication.”

Trauma and Intoxication: A Traumatic Intoxication

This is the second of a series of posts occasioned by my reading of Ernst Jünger’s 1970 book Approaches:  Drugs and Intoxication.

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The first time Ernst Jünger used cannabis he took a more concentrated dosage than he realized.  At first he experienced a blissful euphoria, but then suddenly everything changed, and in an instant euphoria became terror.  At that point the intoxication turned traumatic—or at least at that point the traumatic nature of his intoxication first revealed itself dramatically to Jünger himself.

The episode occurred during a trip Jünger made with is mother at the beginning of the 1920s, only a few years after he had returned from fighting on the German side in the trenches of the Western front during World War I.  He had already made a name for himself on the German literary scene by publishing Storm of Steel, his vivid memoir of his combat service.  Spending a night in transit in an inn in the west-central German town of Halle, after seeing his mother to her room he returned to his own, and took a small amount of extract of cannabis.   He had found an old packet of the stuff on the attic floor of his father’s pharmacy before he and his mother left on their trip, and had brought it along with him.  Perhaps concentrated by age, the small amount he permitted himself to take proved to be far more potent than he might have anticipated.

His experience of intoxication on that occasion began with him lying down on his bed to read the book he’d also brought along, a copy of 1,001 Arabian Nights.  He describes it himself, well along in Approaches:  Drugs and Intoxication, in section 194 of a total of 315 (in my somewhat free translation):

I stretched out and opened the book. .  .  .  Then I heard the sea roar, and strode its strand.

The images were stark and immediate:  un-reflected.  Till then they had shone like a light in a mirror–now I saw the light itself, and up close.  I had been reading the text like a good translation, now I heard it in its primordial language.  It was no longer reading.  The fairy-tale revealed a depth that I had not suspected.  It provided access to the sea itself and its murmuring monotony.  Whoever heard that, whomever it penetrated, no longer needed the text, no longer needed the letters.

I set the book aside; my breathing grew faster, more filled with relish.  Every inhalation was a pleasure; I became conscious of it myself.  I felt it as a light touch of the diaphragm.  The touch was rhythmic, that of a pendulum, that grazed, caressed and then lost itself in a wide swing.  It came back and stroked again, a little more deeply and tenderly.  I went forth, to wander the strand, and hear the sea rustling; it was delicious, a pleasure.  The pendulum swung and came again; its force grew stronger.  Now I went with it into the heights . . . .  Its swing the shape of a crescent moon . . . , it barely touched the skin, stroked by the breeze of its passage.  Sensitivity increased as the swinging continued—dizzying at the apogee.  It forced laughter, then swung whistling back down.  The motion was no longer maintainable, no longer to be controlled; it had reached such an intensity that it threatened to come unhinged.

Sheer joy followed serenity, giving way in turn to uneasiness and then anxiety, with almost no transition between.  The pendulum, once it had reached its highest point, swung back in the opposite direction.  Just like children playing with a small fire and amusing themselves with the flame, until it suddenly climbs howling and crackling into the treetops.  Then they scatter and flee.  That can happen in an instant.

Our sensitivity is limited.  When we overreach its scale, perception can become paradoxical, just as touching things frozen deeply enough can produce blisters.  Extreme pain can flip over into pleasure . . . .  In the same way, joy can become too strong.  Then it shows up as rape committed against nature; the page turns, and in an instant.

The discomfort did not come gradually; it erupted suddenly at full strength.  The reach of the pendulum remained undiminished, but it [now] moved in the opposite direction, as though uncoupled.  I jumped up, glanced in the mirror, and no longer recognized myself.  The blanched face there, distorted by laughter, was stronger than mine, and filled with hatred for me.  It plotted evil; I must not let it loose.

In his introduction to the 2008 edition of Jüngers reflections on “drugs and intoxication,” German newspaper literature critic Volker Weidermann cites this episode from the text, remarking in his opening line that the anguish Jünger felt on that occasion was of a sort that “crops up hardly anywhere else in his work.”  Weidermann observes that the anguish at issue was “ a death-anguish, pure terror, the disabling glance into another world.”  Then, after citing most of Jüngers description of the incident given above, Weidermann writes ironically:  “Jünger feared death, but even more he feared, and this gives the scene an almost grotesquely comic air:  his mother.”  He then quotes the lines of Jünger’s text that immediately follow what I cited above:  “I must have swallowed too strong a dose.  It could have been fatal.  [But] above all, quiet!  Don’t wake Mother!”

As Weidermann goes on to note, Jünger, realizing that he needs help, desperately tries to find some other solution than that very most desperate one, the one of “waking Mother.”  None of his strategies work, however.  Soon he concludes that ‘[t]here is no helping it:  I must wake Mother.”

Once Jünger finally has to resort to that most dreaded of all recourses, Mother swings into action.  A doctor is summoned, who in turn orders that some strong coffee be brought for Jünger to drink.  Drinking it, writes Weidermann, “restores Jünger in a moment.”  Weidermann then cites Jünger himself on the resultant return of his good spirits:  “It was more than well-being, it was a deep comfort of existence.  Such good fortune arrives without reason; it comes like a wave that overwhelms us.  We don’t know the cause.  Perhaps somewhere in the distance a meteor has plunged into the sea.”

In the text at issue, Jünger himself immediately adds that it could also be that  “perhaps the stars were just in the right alignment,” but Weidermann does not include that line.  Instead, after citing the remark about the possible meteor, he again interrupts the citation to remark, again with light irony:  “Yes.  Perhaps.  And, [Jünger] goes on, that’s exactly ‘the sort of luck that comes ever more rarely.’”

In his tone both here and, even more, slightly earlier, when commenting on Jünger’s fear of waking his mother being greater than his fear of the monster he saw in his mirror, Weidermann just stays at the level of a fashionable, “post-modernist” sort of irony.  By doing that he misses the truly rich ironies strongly at play in Jünger’s own text—so rich as even to overflow Jünger’s own  awareness of them, perhaps.

Those ironies begin to emerge when places Jünger’s description of his first cannabis experience, with his mother in the nearby room in Halle in the 1920s, back into the context in which it occurs.  That context is first and foremost provided by the book as a whole, Approaches:  Drugs and Intoxication, in which Jünger first publishes that description.  Context is also provided by Jünger’s entire, life-spanning string of publications over fifty years, from Storm of Steel in 1920 to Approaches itself, from fifty years later, in 1970.

I will concentrate for the most part upon the former, more limited context, that of the book as a whole.  Even there, my discussion will by no means be exhaustive, however.  It will draw upon only a few important examples.  As for the broader context, that of Jünger’s entire opus, my discussion will be even briefer—primarily dealing with two of his preceding publications, both brief themselves: one from between the two World Wars, On Pain (or Over Pain: Über den Schmerz), first published in 1934, and the other from after World War II, On the Line (Über die Linie), first published in 1950.

With regard to the context provided by the book as a whole, those who read all of Approaches will discover that mirrors and mirrorings–reflectors and reflections:  screens for imaging, and the images screened upon them–are a recurrent theme throughout the entire work.  Often intersecting with that first theme is a second recurring one–that of “the Mother.”  The book is rich with passages addressing both themes—and most especially the subtle and diverse interconnections that can emerge between the two.

Accordingly, someone who comes to Jünger’s  recounting of his first cannabis experience after first reading the whole preceding text, and who is attentive to the recurrence and interweaving of those two themse, will not let Weidermann’s presentation of that episode at the very start of his introduction freeze one’s understanding.  Instead, such a reader will realize that Jünger’s account of that episode–which doesn’t occur until about four-fifths of the way through the book, as is befitting for what can, at least with regard to the two themes I’ve mentioned, be taken as a climatic passage—resonates in complex ways with earlier passages on mirrors, images, and the Mother.

One such passage, this one on the theme of the Mother, occurs in the first chapter of the book, “Skulls and Reefs “(“Schädel und Riffe”),in ¶7.   Jünger is talking about the power that the symbol of the skull has in so many cultures.  That includes the frequent use in European cultures of a human skull as a “death’s head,” a symbol of mortality—and, it is worth noting, of toxicity, which is more than etymologically related to intoxication, as I will eventually discuss in detail (but not in today’s post).   In ¶7 he addresses how today (which for this purpose can be taken to mean either 1970 or 2012, since what he says fits both equally), when the apparent mysteries of the skull have been dissipated under the search-light of x-rays, and by the entirety of the sciences to which x-ray technology belongs, the symbol of the skull, including its use in the death’s head, has been, in effect, de-symbolized.  That is, modern science and the basic existential attitude from which the rise and dominance of that science is inseparable have shorn the skull of its symbolic power, as Delilah sheared Samson of his (my connection, not Jünger’s).

On just that score, Jünger writes “it is to be noted that we [of today] are everywhere party to a vanishing of symbols,” an atrophy of the very power of the symbol and symbolization as such.  “Only a few powers will be able to withstand” that process, he continues.  Then, after writing an em-dash to call special attention to what follows, he ends his sentence by observing that perhaps there is only one such elemental symbolic power, one that will outlive the general decay of the symbol as such:  “—perhaps only the Mother.”

No wonder, then, that the one thing of which Jünger that night in the early 1920s in Halle is even more afraid than of the demon he sees in the mirror of the room at the inn when his first dose of cannabis utters the “Sesame” that opens the door to his own horror of himself, is precisely—waking the Mother!  Above all things, even above the fear of the monster he is to himself, he must be careful not to wake thatmost powerful of all powers, the Mother!    That most ancient of all powers, the very source of all power as such, must not be awakened, whatever the cost.  For to awaken that primordial power, the Ur-power itself, would require facing at last  the terror of all terrors, the dread of all dreads:  dread of the Mother.

From that perspective–the “Open, sesame!” to which Jünger’s account of his experience in Halle, taken in context, can utter for us–the old story in accordance with which it is the Father whom mortals cannot see face-to-face and live, is nothing but a screen behind which hides the horrible truth.  That truth is that it is not the Father, but the Mother who cannot be looked at directly without dying.  The Father in the fable is nothing but a soothing inverse-projection.  It gives us mortals a security-blanket, in effect.  Like Linus in Peanuts, we can walk around with our thumbs stuck solidly in our mouths–and our whole heads themselves, perhaps, buried in even less sunny places—just so long as we have our cherished blanket of the fearsome Father to carry around with us.

The ancient Greeks already knew that.  The knowledge, even older than the Greeks themselves, is carried in the myth of the Medusa, for example.  Beholding the face of Medusa turns one into stone.   Medusa is the Mother, however, at least by the reading I am suggesting.  So understood, the myth of Medusa delivers the warning that anyone who gazes straight at the Mother is scared stiff—petrified, which is to say made rock-hard.

Thus, looking at the Mother makes one like Peter, that rock of the Church.  Or like a sort of involuntary, permanent erection, perhaps.  But that is another point– and other connections–to which I plan eventually to return.

At any rate, with those remarks on stones and petrifications, my reading of Jünger’s account of his episode with his mother in Halle, when he first used cannabis, has brought me around to the topic of—pain, and therewith to Jünger’s own essay of 1934, On Pain.

There—with On Pain on pain—I will start my next post.

Trauma and Intoxication: First Post in a New Series

This is the first in what will be a series of posts under the general title of “Trauma and Intoxication.”

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Today, November 11, the day on which I am posting this, has come to be known as Veterans Day.  However, it is only since 1947 that it has been known by that name.  Prior to that, it was known as Armistice Day.  The first celebration of Armistice Day as an officially proclaimed holiday—literally a holy day–took place on November 11, 1919.  In his proclamation of that first Armistice Day, President Woodrow Wilson said:

To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.

 

Wilson proclaimed that first Armistice Day holiday for November 11, 1919, precisely because one year before that, November 11, 1918, was “armistice day” itself:  the day when, at the 11^th hour of that 11^th month of the year, the defeated Germany was made to sign the armistice that marked the official end of the formal hostilities that constitute what today is ordinarily called “World War I.”

We call the formal hostilities at issue, which took place from August of 1914 till November 1918, by that name because we’ve grown accustomed to calling the formal hostilities that broke out again in Europe in 1939 and continued until 1945, “World War II.”  Before the latter set of formal hostilities came around, the earlier set was referred to differently:  as the World War, or just “the war,” period.

The same Woodrow Wilson who proclaimed the first American Armistice Day also helped label that war whose end the armistice at issue supposedly marked “the war to end all wars,” which proved, of course, to be at best a wildly optimistic identification.  Far from ending war as such, what has now long been called World War I can easily be seen in retrospect to have just been the beginning of the terrible warfare that characterized the whole 20^th century, which may itself not yet be at an end (just as it has often been said that the 20^th century did not really begin, and the 19^th end, until the firing of “the guns of August” in 1914).

In a very important, real sense, what we call World War I has yet to be concluded, even if at 11:00 a.m. in France on the 11^th day of the eleventh month of 1918 the guns fell silent in Europe, and remained silent until September of 1939.  In that same sense, when we celebrate Armistice Day, long ago become Veterans Day, on November 11, we are celebrating something yet to come, something for which we can still hope and pray, rather than something that happened and ended long ago.

The Wikipedia entry for Veterans  Day is one place Wilson’s words proclaiming the first Armistice day can be found.  In that same article we can also read that Veterans Day is “not to be confused with Memorial Day.”  That is because “Veterans Day celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans, while Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving.”

Yet just as it is debatable, to use a mild formulation, that what is now called World War I has even yet ended, so is it equally debatable that anyone who served in the armed forces of the warring parties during that war did not die in the process of so serving.  It may well be the case that in a crucially important sense there were no survivors among those who so served during World War I.

Such examples as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, who, respectively, probably and certainly committed suicide only years after the Second World War was “officially” ended, raise the question of whether anyone who was imprisoned at Auschwitz under the Nazis in the 1940s, as both were, ever truly managed to “surive” Auschwitz at all.  There is an important, legitimate sense in which Levi’s and Améry’s deaths years after 1945 belong to the aftershocks, as it were, of their Auschwitz imprisonment.  In the same way, in an important, legitimate way it can be asked whether any of those who “served” in World War I, on either side, managed to “survive” the experience at all, even if the dates of death on their death-certificates do not occur until years–even many, many years—after November 11, 1918.

One such person, someone who served in the military forces of one of the combatants during World War I, and whose official date of death did not occur till many years after November 1918—indeed, almost eighty years after that, in February 1998, just a month or so shy of his 103^rd birthday—was the author of a book I have been reading recently.  That author was a frontline combat soldier in the trenches of the hostilities in Europe of 1914-1918, and that experience indelibly stamped the entirety of his long, long life, as it did everything he wrote in a long and illustrious career as a writer.  Indeed, there is definitely a crucial sense in which that was all he ever wrote about, from his journals of those war years themselves, down through the extensive list of books and articles he was to write and publish between 1920, when his first book, an account of his combat experience, was published, until his death in 1998—and even beyond that, since a considerable portion of what he wrote was first published only posthumously.

As I’ve already mentioned, it was reading one of that author’s books—a relatively late one, not published until 1970–that has occasioned me to write a series of posts on “Trauma and Intoxication,” beginning with this one.  Given the definitive importance that his combat experience during World War I had in that author’s life and all his writing, I decided it would be fitting to post this first entry in that series today, on Veterans Day—a holiday name beneath which is buried that of Armistice Day, even deeper than which lies the original armistice day itself, the day that brought the formal hostilities of the World War we may still be fighting today to a close, at least for a while, namely, November 11, 1918.

What follows, then, is the first of my planned series of posts on trauma and intoxication.

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For a long while already, it has been no news to anyone at all familiar with such matters, that there is a correlation between trauma and “substance abuse.”  Rates of incidence of what are often called substance addictions—that is, addictive usage of alcohol, heroin or other narcotics, tranquillizers, sedatives, diet pills, or the like, including even food—are significantly higher among those who are classified as having undergone traumatic experience, such as sexual abuse, frontline combat, or torture, than for the general population as a whole.  The same applies just as well to what are often called process addictions, which involve the addictive repetition of certain behaviors, such as acting out one’s sexual fantasies, cutting oneself, or getting into abusive relationships, without that behavior necessarily including the addictively repetitive consumption of such things as alcohol, heroin, or even potato chips.

It’s also old news–so no news–that intoxication, in turn, can lead to potentially traumatic results–results occurring as a consequence of the path chosen to bring on the intoxication.  So, for instance, practicing for a long enough time such intoxicating non-substance-ingesting behaviors as sexual acting-out may result in the practitioner eventually contracting AIDs.  Similarly, recurrently drinking alcohol shortly before driving one’s car can end one up in a hospital after one drunkenly causes an accident.  Or the same behavior can lead to being sentenced to a penitentiary term for committing vehicular homicide by causing such a crash.  Or it may just be a matter of being stopped by the police as one crash-less-ly weaves one’s car home, and then being arrested on a drunk-driving charge—which is trauma enough for most drinkers, even if it’s just another irritating interruption in the long career of a truly devoted drunk.

In all such cases of trauma consequent to intoxication, whether a case of “substance abuse” or one of what we might call “process abuse,” the traumatic results at issue might be said to be only indirect and circumstantial consequences of the intoxication, rather than belonging directly from the intoxication experience itself as such.  That is, they all have to do with the circumstances under whichone gets intoxicated.

As indirect or circumstantial in relation to intoxication, such traumatic consequences of intoxication could theoretically be avoided by simply choosing wisely the means by which, and circumstances under which, intoxication is induced.  For instance, if one celebrates some event by drinking to drunkenness with one’s co-celebrants, but is careful to bring along some intentionally abstaining “designated driver” to drive one home afterward, then one can escape risking the consequences all too often attendant upon driving drunk.

But in addition to such circumstantial, indirect traumatic consequences of intoxication, there are those that belong to the intoxication itself, constituting all or at least an essential part of the intoxication as such.  It is that latter class of cases that interest me most.

I will take my example of what I have in mind from the account that one cannabis user once wrote of one of his first experiences with taking that drug.

The account at issue comes from the widely read and highly influential German writer Ernst Jünger.  Jünger was born at the end of the 19^th century, near the end of March, 1895.   At least as such matters are usually conceived, he managed to survive almost all of the 20^thcentury, living three years longer than100 years himself.  Jünger did not manage to survive most of the 20^th century thanks to being a bystander to the massively traumatic events that punctuated that century.  Rather, he was a participant in more than one of them.  Most significantly he was an active participant in what was perhaps the definitive trauma not only for him personally but also for the entire 20^th century as a whole, in that he was a frontline soldier in the First World War, serving as a youth in the trenches on the German side.

The armistice of November 11, 1918, brought the troops on both sides out of those trenches—though in the most important sense it left the war raging on, as it still does to this day, almost a century after it was declared in August 1914, and though many even still today have yet truly to hear the report of the guns of that only apparently long ago August.  At any rate, not many months on the calendar after the first Armistice Day, Jünger self-published In Stahlgewittern (English translation, Storm of Steel), the memoir of his experience as a soldier at the front in “the war to end all wars” (which perhaps it did, in the strange form of never-end-ing them, so to speak:  the judgment on that is still pending, a “perfect” storm of its own that is still gathering its strength).

Many years after the guns fell silent in 1918, Jünger, already old, in 1970 published Annäherungen:  Drogen und Rausch–Approaches or Approximations or, more literally, Drawings-Near:  Drugs and Intoxication.  Well along into that book, he gives the example I will use as definitive for what we might call not just indirectly or circumstantially traumatic, but “essentially” so.

*     *     *     *     *

I will give my example from Jünger,  of an  “essentially traumatic” intoxication, at the start of my next post.

The Open Wound: Trauma, Identity, and Community — Now Available!

SPECIAL NOTICE

 

My new book, The Open Wound:  Trauma, Identity, and Community, is now available.  It can be ordered in a print-on-demand paperback version, or in electronic form as a Kindle book.  Both are available through Amazon.com.

 

As regular readers of this blog will recall, I posted the first drafts of most of the chapters of the book here as I wrote them, starting in the fall of 2009 and ending a year and a half later, in the spring of 2011.   Now that those chapters–as well as new material never before published in any form–are now available in the book, I have removed those earlier versions, making the posts containing them no longer available at this blog-site.

Gound Zero, Day Zero, and The Day After

This is the final post in a series of four.

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In the dimension of what has been termed “effective signs,” the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was the collapse of the entire global market system.  The system itself just doesn’t know that yet.  However, that ignorance of its own condition is finally irrelevant.  Since that September morning a bit more than eleven years ago now, when the Towers collapsed, the whole system that collapsed with it but still hasn’t realized the fact has been a sort of zombie.  It has had the status of the “animated undead,” to borrow an apt phrase from Eric L. Santner:  the status of a corpse that’s still walking around, not knowing that it’s dead yet.  The gravediggers are ready to begin throwing the dirt over it, once it finally gets the message and lies down in its already open and waiting grave, so that they can get on with their job.

Who knows how long the corpse of the global market system will wander around like that in the meantime, before it finally just lets itself be decently buried, and stops stinking up the place with its already advanced corruption?  (The topic of its corruption is one to which I will probably address a future post.)  It may take a century or two, for all we know.  Nietzsche said it would take a couple of thousand years for the news of what he called “the death of God” to get around.  That may well  even include getting back to the Old Boy, “God” Himself.  The story of the death of the “New World Order,” as it got called for a while going back to the first Bush Presidency—and which belongs, in fact, to the “larger” story Nietzsche tries to tell, of “God’s” dying—won’t take that long, but may still take quite a while.

However, the wisdom of Bill Murray in Meatballs works yet again in this case:  “It just doesn’t matter!”  However long it may take for the stench to get to the nose of the still highly animated corpse of the global market system itself, convincing it to take its proper place in its own grave, its dead flesh has been reeking of corruption for better than eleven years already, at the least.  It is stone cold dead, whether it knows it yet itself or not—or perhaps even ever comes to know it.  (Indeed, maybe it will never really get the message.  Maybe it will just eventually just vanish, like smoke on the wind, or like the phantoms of one’s dreams when one wakes.)

At any rate, however long the word takes fully to get out, what is euphemistically called the “global market system,” “New World Order,” or whatever, died on the morning of September 11, 2001.  It collapsed with and in the Twin Towers.  Jean Baudrillard, for one, told us that.

At the beginning of today’s post, I wrote that it was as an “effective sign” that the collapse of the Twin Towers was as such already the collapse of the very global system the Towers themselves globally represented.  It was the failure to stand of the whole global system those Towers, when they stood themselves, so effectively symbolized for all the globe defined by that same system.  It was by standing globally for that global system that the standing Towers drew the attention to themselves of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the first place, and drew from them the intention to attack those towers themselves.  And it was by failing any longer to hold their stand at all once struck by the two planes, and falling down into massive piles of rubble that they brought down with them the whole global shebang of which they had all along been the standing emblem.

I have borrowed the phrase and notion of an “effective sign” from Christian tradition, where it is used, in such “liturgical” Christian denominations as Catholicism and Anglicanism to define what such Christianity calls a “sacrament.”  The prime example of a Christian “sacrament” is the ceremony of baptism with water and oil.  Other examples are the Christian ceremonies of marriage, or the ceremony of anointing the sick.  A sacrament is said to be “an outward and spiritual sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” to employ a classic formula.  However, the way in which that sign signifies, in effect, is itself said to be “effective” with regard to the very thing it signifies.  That is, it is a sign the very making or bestowing or signing of which accomplishes, brings about, or effects the very thing, the very condition or state of affairs, that the sign is used to point to or signify.

For example, immersing someone in water, or at least pouring a small amount of it over someone’s head, in the context of a properly performed baptism ceremony, or marking the same person with oil in the form of a cross on the forehead, does not just point to or “represent” becoming a Christian, it is the very ceremony of baptism that makes one a Christian.  Similarly, to use an example that applies not only to Christianity or is even confined to the “religious” tradition in general, assume that a person duly empowered to do so, performs a wedding ceremony.  Let that person be a rabbi, a priest, a minister, an imam, or other recognized figure in some faith tradition, or let her be a justice of the peace, or even just an average nobody, as permitted in the “common-law-marriage” state of Colorado where I live, and where I once a few years ago even performed a wedding ceremony myself, at the odd request of a good friend.  At the climactic point of the wedding ceremony, the person so empowered to perform that ceremony “pronounces” the couple not to be married.  That “pronouncment”–, that “speech act,” as it came to be called in 20^th century philosophy and beyond–doesn’t just make the claim that the couple are now married; its “pronouncing” is what actually marries them.

In short, what in Christianity are thus called “effective signs” are what, in the different tradition of contemporary philosophy, following the 20^th century British philosopher J. L. Austin, are also called “performative utterances” or “performative speech-acts,” or just “performatives.”  That is, they are “utterances” or “speech acts”–in a sense of the term “speech” that includes such things as burning the American flag in protest against American policies, or flipping someone off–that perform the very thing they say (or “mean”).

In just that sense, by uttering some such formula as “with this ring I thee wed” at the right time in a wedding ceremony, the person doing the uttering is not making any claim about her own status, or about the status of the other person to whom she utters those words, or even about their common status vis-à-vis one another.  Rather, by saying such a thing in such a setting the speaker actually marries the other person to she addresses those words, marries that other by and in uttering those very words in that very setting.

Considered in terms of what the collapse of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, “meant” or “signified,” their collapsing was the performing or effecting of the collapse of that which they themselves “meant” or “signified.”  In that sense—the sense of the very “sense” of their own collapse—what they demonstrated in ceasing to stand was the ceasing to stand of the entire global power system they “represented.”  To everyone’s total surprise that morning—even and especially the utter surprise of the “terrorists” who planned and carried out the attacks of that morning, as Baudrillard rightly emphasizes—the Towers did just that, collapse, when they were struck.  Their collapsing made visible what theretofore had been hidden from all view:  Their own lack of enduring “structural integrity,” their own incapacity to continue to stand in all weather, despite all their apparent power to do just that.  By collapsing, the Towers proved that their standing, in the full sense, really never was any more than just that:  apparent.  It was nothing real.

Standing there in Manhattan, towering over the skyline as they did for all the years they stood, the Towers symbolized the invincibility of the global market power establishment itself.  But then suddenly, on September 11, 2001, the impossible happened.  Something not only unforeseen but unforeseeable, altogether un-imaginable, un-believable, happened anyway.  It was unimaginable and unbelievable even for those who intellectually may have perfectly well known all along that it was thinkable (indeed, one could even create special effects to have them collapse in a disaster-movie).  Those who had such knowledge nevertheless never really imagined or believed what they knew, just as the outbreak of World War I was unimaginable and unbelievable to Henri Bergson, even though he knew perfectly well all along before it finally did break out, that such a war was not only possible, but probable (as I have written about before in this blog).

For all similarly self-confidently knowing knowers before September 11, 2001–as well as for everyone else, of course–the collapse of the Twin Towers proved that the impossible was nevertheless actual.   Contrary to all expectations everywhere, definitely and crucially including the “terrorists” themselves, as Baudrillard rightly insists, the Towers proved themselves unable to with-stand the very attacks they themselves–in all they stood for, and to symbolize which they were constructed in the first place–called forth.  They, and therewith the entire system they symbolized, proved finlly to be powerless to make good on the very claim to power that they, in their very standing there so erect in the first place, expressed, uttered, or pronounced—the claim whereby global power laid claim to the globe itself.

It all came tumbling down with the Towers themselves.  It all fell, and in falling shattered into slivers that all the falling, fallen power’s forces and all that power’s men could never put back together again.

Once we realize that, which means realize what really happened that day, once we finally let what happened take its own proper place, as I put it in an earlier series of posts, on the works of Jacques André, then we ourselves can finally get down to our own real business–which has never been business, to purloin for irony’s sake a phrase from an apt source.  We can crawl out of our caves to see that, yes, the worst is over now, to steal non-ironically from a very different sort of source.  When we do, we will see that a new Day has indeed dawned, a Day After that day in 1945 that nullified even it own massive nullification of the Day itself, reducing all Days to come to no more than a string of meaningless zeros.  On September 11, 2001, The Day After that Day to end all Days, after which no new Day was even imaginable any longer, altogether unbelievably another Day dawned anyway.  And the morning sun of that Day does indeed shine, not like a bright, rubber ball but with the blinding brightness of a nuclear explosion–but, un-like that nuclear sun, blinding only temporarily.

We don’t even especially need to seize that Day.  All we have to do is begin living in it, now that the endless night has surprised us by ending.  In fact, luxurious new growth in that new Day has already begun sprouting up everywhere.  We just need to grow accustomed enough to the new light to be able to see it.

We’ll no doubt just have to keep on blinking till then, in that regard still looking indistinguishable from Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” that old pest that is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle, but has nevertheless been eradicated, even if he’s still running around, like a chicken with it’s head already cut off.  Despite appearances, however, we will belong to a different human race.

*     *     *     *     *     *

I’m certainly still blinking myself.  But as my vision continues to clear, I’ll no doubt try in some future posts to point out some places where I can see some of the luxuriant new growth.  Meantime, while you continue blinking yourself, you might want to give your eyes a little rest by re/reading Baudrillard on “the spirit of terrorism.” 

Ground Zero, Day Zero, and The Day After–continued yet again

Day Zero, the Day that dawned when the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was not just another Day.  Rather, it was the Day that ended all Days, the point at which the Day as such vanished without trace, as I tried to articulate in my pervious post.  As Günther Anders saw so clearly, what was truly unique about Day Zero—what made it the Day to end all Days–was not the devastation of an entire city and the killing of two-hundred-thousand of its inhabitants in a single flash, as shockingly horrendous as such sudden devastation and death may be.  Unfortunately, even such awful destruction has all too many precedents, and the speed of destruction remains a difference of degree, not kind.  No, what was truly unique about Day Zero, what made it the very null point of the Day as such, was that it marked the onset of the devastation of the very devastation, the masking of the devastation under a façade that almost immediately began to take the form of rapid reconstruction.  What was truly horrible was, so to speak, not the demolition of the city, but the demolition of its ruins.

Worth noting is that another important author who, like Anders, survived the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe—though he survived it differently, going through Auschwitz itself, whereas Anders survived by going into exile in France and eventually the United States—is concerned to make the same point.  I mean Jean Améry.  In Lefeu oder Der Abbruch (Lefeu or The Demolition), his final novel, Améry’s title character (whose name, “Lefeu,” is French for fire) resists all orders to leave the run-down, condemned, decaying apartment building in which he lives in Paris, so that the old, no longer functional dump can be demolished to permit brand new construction.  Through Lefeu Améry stages his own protest, a protest against the destruction of ruins as such.  Lefeu asserts our need to live among the ruins of our life, as opposed to our desire to bury those ruins beneath the frenetic busy-ness of everyday contemporary activity.  Lefeu himself, in Améry’s hands, becomes a call to remember the ruins, rather than to try to move “beyond them,” to build something “new” over them, burying them beneath our re-constructions.

To return to Anders, the third, final, and by far shortest (only about 30 pages total) of his three works that make up Anders’s 1982 publication, Hiroshima Is Everywhere, is The Dead:  Speech on the Three World Wars, first delivered in 1964 and first published the following year.  In it, Anders himself discusses what is required of those of us who are survivors, those who have been left behind by the dead.  Specifically, he means those who, like himself, were left behind by the millions of those who died fighting on the German side during the first two World Wars.  His concern, that is, is with the survivors of those whom Germany enlisted into its forces and sent into battle to die on the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and North Africa from 1914-1945.  Anders strongly insists that what makes the deaths of all those millions so hard to bear for their families and compatriots left behind is that they all died (page 364) “for nothing,” that they died, as he poignantly puts it, “not for their country, but to its shame.”  He goes on to insist just as vehemently that it is only when the survivors, such as himself, left behind in such cases “hold fast to that knowledge”—the knowledge that their dead died for nothing–that they can “truly honor the dead.”  Only then, in turn, can their survivors make it true that those who died did not die in vain! “Whether they died in vain or not,” he writes, “depends on us, who have been left behind.  On our incorruptibility”—on such survivors not being open to any sort of bribery to cover over the fact that their dead did indeed die for nothing.   “Only so do we pay them their due.”*

The specific millions of dead at issue in Andres’s remarks—namely, the millions of Germans and their allies who were sent to die in battle during the first two World Wars—have the distinctive status of what Anders calls “die schuldlos Schuldigen,” which literally translates as “the guiltlessly guilty,” but which we might more usefully render as “innocent perpetrators.”  At least many if not most such innocent perpetrators were also what Anders calls “victim-perpetrators” (Opfer-Täter), those whose acts inflicted suffering on others, but who themselves also suffered from their own acts as well (albeit they may well have suffered differently:  for example, from feelings of guilt, quite possibly even overwhelming ones, for what they did).

At any rate, whether “only” innocent perpetrators, or “also” victim-perpetrators, in all such cases what is at issue are those who, perhaps with what ordinarily count as the best of motives, such as love of their country, carry out acts that help accomplish or at least enable such deeds of horror as the extermination of the Jews of Europe—or, to use another example, the one for which Anders first employs the term at issue, the bombing of Hiroshima.  Anders’s uses the expression “schuldlos Schuldigen” to describe the American pilot Claude Eatherly, who piloted one of the planes flying reconnaissance and providing accompaniment to the Enola Gay as it went to drop the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, and who subsequently suffered guilt for what he had helped perpetrate against the people of Hiroshima, and the world.  The second and longest part of Anders’s book on the ubiquity of Hiroshima consists of a long exchange of letters between him and Eatherly.

The six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II may not themselves have shared any guilt for those murders–though the extermination-camp system of inmate capos and “special commands” (Sondercommandos) constitutes a moral “gray zone,” as Primo Levi famously called it.  That is, they may not have been “innocent perpetrators” in the sense that Anders applies to Eatherly, or to the German war dead from the first two World Wars.  The distinctions involved in these various cases are well worth careful reflection, and I may return to them in some later posts.  However, what I am concerned with here is one important thing these different cases all have in common, which is that in every case, from the most purely innocent victims to the most guiltily compromised ones, those who died from their victimization all died for nothing, to use Anders way of putting it.  If they were “innocent perpetrators” who died in the process of committing their deeds of perpetration, then they may have died not only for nothing, but also “to the shame of” that in whose name they went to their deaths (e.g., their country).  In contrast, of course, the millions of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis died to no shame of Judaism.  However, be that as it may, they still died for nothing—died for no good reason whatever, died without any justification for their dying.  That is what I want to address.  Specifically, I want to address the same question Anders addressed in his remarks about all the dead innocent perpetrators of German aggression during the first half of the twentieth century.  That is the question of how we can properly honor such dead, who died for nothing.

Anders not only raises that question for us, but also gives us the best answer to it, an answer I’ve already cited:  We honor such dead only by holding fast to this, that their death was “for nothing,” that they were wasted, their lives and the lives of their loved ones shattered, reduced to ruin, for nogood reason whatever.   Thus, we pay the dead who died for nothing their due only by refusing to bury the fact that their lives were squandered for nothing.  That is what it means, genuinely to honor them.  In means, in effect, to preserve the ruins of all their lives—to preserve them as ruins, and not as convenient means for marshalling resources for new accomplishments, or just as museum pieces to provide opportunities for education and entertainment for the living.

Never to forget, always to remember, all those millions upon millions who died for nothing—died for nothing in Auschwitz, in Hiroshima, or even at the fronts as German soldiers in battle–is to reject all endeavors to demolish the ruins, and replace them with glittering new fabrications.  It is to refuse to call out “peace, peace” where there is no peace, but instead to keep exposed the face of war that everywhere reigns, consigning all things to obliteration, even and especially the evidence of the very obliteration itself.  It is to remember the ruins and to preserve them as such, defying the demolition of the ruins, protesting alongside Lefeu, Améry, and Anders.

Viewed from the sort of perspective Günther Anders adopts in the final part of his three-part book on Hiroshima, what he identifies as “the three World Wars”—the first two “hot,” the third one “cold”—show themselves to be but the revelation of three faces of a single nihilistic Anti-Trinity, the Counter-Divinity of Demolition that imploded so gaudily over Hiroshima in August 1945.  Dying in 1992, Anders lived long enough to see the end of the Third World War, the “cold” one, and therewith the end of the whole process:  the finalization of the disappearance of the devastation cast up everywhere by triumphant, ceaseless war, the burial of all the ruins beneath the mask of the global market.  Anders, with his philosophical background, might have recognized that the world thereby entered into the end stage of despair, by Kierkegaard’s lights—the despair which does not even know it is in despair, but thinks it is, or at least ought to be, just pleased as punch.  From such a black hole of despair, no light of hope can any longer escape:  All genuine hope has vanished along with all the ruins.

Fundamentally, August 6, 1945, was Day Zero not because on that day such horrendous ruins appeared, the ruins of an entire city, reduced to rubble in less than the blink of an eye.  Rather, that day was Day Zero–the nullification of the Day itself, the multiplication of zero days to infinity—because on that day the ruins themselves began to be dis-appeared, like Argentines under the Junta.  It was Day Zero because that day  “the Demolition”—the Abbruch to protest against which Lefeu/Améry give their very lives–began.  Day Zero was Demolition Day, the Day the ruins went away.

But then, beyond all possible expectation, suddenly, on September 11, 2001, the impossible happened.  On that day, the ruins returned.  In the vast void of endless accumulation of zero days, all the countless string of days during which the global wasteland just stretched on and on, history itself having come to its end, or rather the end of its end—suddenly the whole façade began to shimmer, and then to break apart, and to collapse, revealing beneath its gaudy, fun-house veil the nullity it had till then concealed.  The ruins reappeared.  A Day again dawned, even “after” Day Zero, the day all days were reduced to zeros, another Day “after” the Day the Day itself died.

September 11, 2001:  The Day After.

*     *     *     *     *     *

There is more to explain about that.  So I will need to continue this series on “Ground Zero, Day Zero, and The Day After” for yet one more post.

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* In The Open Wound:  Trauma, Identity, and Community, which I have just published (available through amazon.com), I try to make the same point in a different way, without using the same verbal distinction Anders does between dying “for nothing” and dying “in vain.”  I am in full agreement with what I understand him to be saying through such locutions, however.  The difference is solely one of formulation.