I began writing this as a FaceBook comment, in response to this, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=457778147942543&id=100011310857862 , but it seems to have turned into a blogpost.
[Steven Craig Hickman] “It’s as if we are in a pre-WWII novel living out the nightmares and repetitions of some strange and nefarious experiment gone awry… someone plz close that portal and put the hellish brew back into the abyss.
Somehow we’ve got to stop the hate, now.
I keep remembering the first time I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. But it can… and, dam it if we don’t do something it will get worse. As if Lewis were speaking of Trump: “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there’s been enough indication that we can have tyranny in America—” …. listening to Trump bark at NK and Venezuela one wonders if he is seeking some event so he can impose Martial Law and become a populist dictator in actual not virtual fact and deed.
Sadly, we’re just allowing it to happen, and the Establishment dems and repubs are sitting idly by like idiots, doing nothing.”
{AK}: Really, Steven, what can they do? It’s the people themselves who voted for Trump. It’s the people themselves who swarm and cluster around whatever simplified political polarities are subjected to inflationary exploitation by businesses of fringe hysteria. It’s politics as identity ideology consumerism, in search of a ‘reality’.
The guy who started the ‘fake news’ business, catering for the Trump crowd, is actually a Democrat; but there is money to be made in selling the nostalgia of a certain kind of majority ethnocentric confirmation bias.
As I’ve pointed out before, many times on my blog, the dominant hegemony is oneiric. Only by looking at all the data, as configured by systems of dream and desire, does a certain clarity take place. In practice, everyone knows that. Marketing is all about that. Bannon, and Cambridge Analytics, exploited it to the hilt.
Positivist appropriation of mythic nostalgia is an ongoing fact. ‘In fact’, it produces ‘facts’. Paul Ricoeur’s “conflict of interpretations” is the model of the mediascape’s ‘contest of realities’. It’s all, a “Logan’s Run” scenario, driven by positivist desire. Whether it’s a desire for ‘common sense’; ‘scientific sense’; ‘religious sense’; ‘financial sense’; ‘aesthetic sense’; or even ‘political sense’; it’s all deprecated into caricatures of ineffectual, positivist simplicity. Caricatures in the service of complexity-avoidance, at precisely the time when complexity is ‘reality’.
The explicit relation between Healthcare; the Protestant-Calvinist ‘work ethic’ and its accusatory moralisations, leading to various positivist moral isolations; and capital; necessarily sets up a gladiatorial arena of competing moral representations. The discrepancy between lived reality of social conditions and the veneer of obligatory moral presentation, necessarily produces reflexivities of moral representation, in which any simple notion of communal and consensual ‘reality’ is bound to collapse. This can be observed. This explains the disingenuousness of Trump speaking against ‘hate’, whilst “instigating it through his backdoor handlers”.
The “strange and nefarious experiment” you speak of, is exactly what Nick Land refers to, here, some years back, in response to my comments: “Science is modern, not accidentally, but essentially. Modernity is no mere bet, but a venture, through which everything is hazarded, including itself. The widest horizons arise from ‘within’ it (but its ‘inside’ is not, in reality, inside)”
It’s a good answer, and to varying extents, I can agree with it. But again, it’s very easy to fall into a ‘mythology of modernity’; a positivist caricature of surface technical achievements that actually neglects more complex and relevant microcultural-movements, not so susceptible to the abbreviations of modernist mythology. Is it even possible to close “that portal”? Or would that just be another simplifying figuration of positivist reduction? The panic projection of a horrifying ‘abyss’ into which can be cast the “hellish brew” of desire and profit driven alienations, dreamt as nightmare monstrosity?