1. Nietzsche: The Dangers of Excessive and Insufficient Mythmaking
Nietzsche’s philosophy revolves around the human need for meaning and the consequences when that need is either overindulged or neglected.
Excessive Mythmaking:
When societies construct overly rigid or absolutist myths (religious, ideological, nationalistic), they risk fanaticism. These "thick" narratives demand total allegiance, suppress dissent, and justify violence against perceived threats (e.g., crusades, purges, ideological wars).
In your terms, this is the "lethal conflict" born of "exaggerated importance," where symbolic capital becomes a weapon. Becker’s "hero projects" (nationalism, religion, even science) can become tyrannical when they claim monopoly on truth.
Nietzsche saw this in Christianity’s moral absolutism, which denies life’s chaotic vitality.
Insufficient Mythmaking:
When myths collapse or are too weak, nihilism takes hold. Without sustaining illusions, people confront the abyss directly—leading to despair, paralysis, or what Becker calls the "failure of denial" seen in depression.
Nietzsche feared the "death of God" (the collapse of shared meaning) would leave humanity adrift in a universe without inherent purpose. Your metaphor of the "Kola Superdeep Borehole" captures this: a plummet into unbearable, unfiltered reality.
Nietzsche’s Alternative: The "Tightrope" of Myth:
He advocated for myths that are life-affirming yet mutable—stories that energize without dogmatism. For the creation of values while while simultaneously embracing life’s tragic beauty.
This aligns with your call for stories that admit their own fabrication or confabulation, avoiding both fundamentalism and nihilism.
2. Walter Benjamin: "Brushing History Against the Grain"
Benjamin’s famous phrase from Theses on the Philosophy of History critiques traditional historiography—the way history is usually written by and for the victors.
Official History as a "Pageant of Survival":
You describe civilization as a "gory spectacle," where dominant narratives glorify conquerors while erasing the suffering of the vanquished (the "waste humans," the "living dead"). Benjamin agrees: standard history is a parade of rulers and wars, masking the brutality beneath.
This is the "megamachine" (Mumford) in action: a myth of progress built on corpses.
Brushing Against the Grain:
Benjamin urges us to recover the voices of the oppressed—the enslaved, the colonized, the disposable—whose suffering is smoothed over in official accounts. This is a materialist historiography, attuned to the cracks in the system.
In your framework, this means exposing the "death-worlds" (Mbembe) that lifeworlds depend on but disavow. It’s pulling back the curtain on the "hot air" in the bullfrog’s chest.
Messianic Time vs. Homogeneous Time:
Benjamin contrasts empty, linear "progress" (the myth of inevitable improvement) with "messianic time"—ruptures where the past’s unresolved injustices demand redress now.
This resonates with your critique of "hero projects" (like techno-utopianism) that promise future salvation while ignoring present horror.
Synthesis: Between Nietzsche and Benjamin
Both thinkers grapple with how to live meaningfully in a broken world, but they offer complementary strategies:
Nietzsche warns us to craft myths that are strong enough to inspire but humble enough to avoid tyranny.
Benjamin demands we dismantle the myths of the powerful by resurrecting buried suffering.
Together, they suggest a double movement:
Create life-sustaining fictions (Nietzsche), but interrogate whose pain those fictions erase (Benjamin).
Puff the bullfrog’s chest (to survive), but expose the corpses beneath (to resist complicity).
Your original text implies that the only "ethical" myth is one that acknowledges its own fragility—a paradox Benjamin and Nietzsche, in their ways, spent their lives wrestling with.
Deepseek
Your synthesis here is a profound meditation on the erosion of lifeworld (Habermas) and worldliness (Arendt) under the forces of colonization, neoliberal atomization, and what Byung-Chul Han calls the "burnout society." Let me trace the key threads and expand on their implications.
1. The Destruction of the Lifeworld and the Rise of Terror
Colonization as Lifeworld Disintegration:
Following Habermas, the lifeworld—the shared background of norms, meanings, and communicative practices that sustain social cohesion—is "colonized" by systemic forces (markets, bureaucracies, algorithmic governance). Putnam’s decline of civic associations and Arendt’s warnings about the loss of public space both describe this unraveling.
When these networks atrophy, individuals are left worldless—adrift in what you call a "political desert," where even "light breezes" whip up sandstorms of demagoguery. Without shared institutions to mediate conflict, politics collapses into raw affect (rage, paranoia) or hollow spectacle (phantom publics).
Terror of Non-Belonging:
Arendt’s insight was that totalitarianism thrives in worldlessness—when people are stripped of stable identities and communal ties, they become susceptible to ideological absolutism. The "mass man" (as distinct from a "public") doesn’t recognize shared interests; instead, they are covertly unified by shared terror—an inarticulate dread that is weaponized by authoritarianism.
This aligns with your earlier point about "death-worlds" (Mbembe): systemic violence doesn’t just kill bodies; it kills the possibility of a shared world.
2. The Phantom Public and the Juggernaut of Slow Violence
Argumentum ad Populum and Phantom Majorities:
You evoke Walter Lippmann’s "phantom public"—a manufactured consensus where "public opinion" is a simulacrum, manipulated to justify violence (e.g., wars waged in the name of "the people"). The ad populum fallacy here is lethal: it masks elite interests under the veneer of democracy.
The "slow violence" (Nixon) of ecological collapse, austerity, or carceral systems operates similarly: it’s diffused, impersonal, and blamed on out-groups ("waste humans").
Worldlessness as Structural Gaslighting:
Byung-Chul Han’s point is crucial: the "inwardly turned, narcissistic ego" isn’t the cause of social decay but its product. Systems generate isolation (via hyper-individualism, digital fragmentation) and then pathologize the victims ("Why can’t you adapt?").
We become projects (self-optimizing drones) rather than subjects (autonomous actors), and these projects are weaponized—turned into "projectiles" against others (scapegoating) or ourselves (self-destructive anxiety).
3. The Teflon World: Repressed Negativity and Cultural Narcissism
Positivity as Tyranny:
Han’s "burnout society" argues that late capitalism replaces overt repression with compulsory positivity ("Yes we can!"). Negativity—grief, rage, doubt—is exiled, becoming what Kristeva calls the "abject": a horror that lurks beneath enforced smiles.
The result is a "Teflon slide-show" (a brilliant metaphor): a frictionless consumer reality where suffering is curated away, and trauma is palmed off as personal failure.
Narcissism as Palmed-Off Grief:
Christopher Lasch saw narcissism as a defense against helplessness; Han updates this: when collective mourning is impossible, rage implodes into depression or explodes into reactionary fury.
Akomolafe’s question—"What if politics means grieving together?"—hints at an alternative: politics as the reclamation of shared vulnerability.
4. Stimmung, Eros, and the Alternative
Freedom as Friendliness:
Han’s Stimmung (attunement) suggests freedom isn’t just individual choice but an atmosphere—a mood of openness to the unexpected. This requires profound boredom (a pause from hyperstimulation) and Eros (desire that connects rather than consumes).
But anxiety capitalism kills these moods. Emotional illiteracy—the inability to process grief or anger—traps us in recursive self-surveillance ("Why am I not happy?").
The Need for Negative Dialectics:
Adorno (echoed in your critique) would argue that healing requires negation—confronting the repressed horrors of our systems. This isn’t "positive" activism but a politics of mourning (Benjamin’s "brushing history against the grain").
To resist the "juggernaut," we must recover worldliness: spaces where grief, doubt, and conflict can be voiced without being instrumentalized.
Conclusion: Against the Teflon Slide-Show
Your analysis paints a stark picture: we are caught between the desert (Arendt’s masses, Habermas’s eroded lifeworld) and the slide-show (Han’s positivity tyranny). The way out isn’t a new myth but a practice:
Grieve Together: Akomolafe’s politics of mourning disrupts the Teflon surface.
Cultivate Stimmung: Han’s "friendliness" as resistance to anxiety’s isolation.
Reclaim Negativity: Kristeva’s horror must surface, lest it poison us silently.
The task, then, is to re-world—to rebuild lifeworlds where sandstorms don’t dictate our fate, and where the bullfrog’s chest-puffing admits its own hot air.
Deepseek
No comments:
Post a Comment