The Game of Modernity

Modernity is defined by a game. The game is called The Human vs. The Clock. The game is rigged. The clock always wins. The solution is to abolish the game. We rip the hands off of the face of the clock.

On Progress and Time

Progress is the great delusion. Its pursuit has brought the biotic systems of the Earth to the brink of collapse, has fouled the rivers, has acidified the oceans, has exploded mountain tops, has made plastic backyard fresh air bubble tents a boom industry in China. 

It has robbed us of an experience of the present. The present must be experienced as such: as a blossoming, an unfolding, a revealing. The present offers connection and the movement of the rhizome. It offers access to the past and the possibility of a future. Progress does not.

Return on an Elemental Level

Leave it alone. Don't manage it. And for god's sake, don't develop it. The Earth is the only known habitable place in the universe. It is several billion times more intelligent than you. Don't play around with it. Don't fuck with it. Listen to it. Learn from it. Integrate with it. Return to it. Return to what you are on an elemental level. Return to what you are.

Culture -- Mass and Otherwise

The cultural relativist position that all societies are ultimately the same is based on rhetoric, but not on history or fact. Humans may be the same at the core, but human culture and the values contained within those cultures -- which are ultimately communicated via story and myth -- vary widely. Upon observing that modernity is busy pursuing a suicidal trajectory, it can be edifying to study other cultures and their histories and stories... and why not start with the people who lived on this continent for 12,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans? According to Native American scholars and artists such as Jeanette Armstrong, Vine DeLorean, John Trudell, the primary reason that indigenous peoples were able to live on the continent since the last Ice Age without destroying the soil, the water, the air quality and, ultimately, the climate system can be traced to the fact the founding stories of their cultures do not place humans at the top of some fictional “great chain of being.”

In contrast, the founding stories of European American culture are -- as cultural historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates in his trilogy “Gunfighter Nation” -- based on the bizarre notion that Europeans in the New World are a chosen race who are here to "civilize" Native & African peoples and tame & subdue wild nature. Our stories -- from the first sermons told in Massachusetts to contemporary Hollywood films -- propagate the idea that the European American is constantly under siege and, therefore, all of his violence is justified as noble and self-defensive.

The fact is that the old Western stories are leading us into a rapidly approaching dead end. Literally dead. Culture is the vehicle by which humans’ relations with each other and with our fellow 3.5 million species on the planet are formed. New stories are currently being forged, but the culture industry is successfully blocking their more rapid spread and gestation.

A couple of things I remember distinctly about growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are the following: The factory farmed and packaged and processed food tasted like shit, the corporate beer tasted like piss and the freeze-dried “coffee” in a can was undrinkable sewage. This was food culture mass produced. Mercifully, those very products are now being produced locally: distinct from the Henry Ford model of culture. I can now eat food without vomiting, enjoy the taste of beer and drink espresso for moments of bliss.

Now it seems that popular music played on the radio has now taken over the mantle of mass-produced tasteless shit. Corporate rap, corporate country & corporate pop are sinister in their banality. Although we undervalue culture and the life of the spirit and the mind greatly in the US, the fact remains that bad art, mass produced and mass marketed, is very harmful to the spirit and the mind. Academics ensconced in postmodernist rhetoric want people to believe that cynically manufactured culture is not harmful to us. That is sophistry. I assert that cynically manufactured culture has very real negative consequences. I believe it explains much of the popularity of Donald Trump, a billionaire racist demagogue reality TV star, for example. His rhetoric makes sense to somebody rendered incapable of critical thought, due to his/her immersion in a culture guided by the logic of manufacturing and mass consumption.

On the Bus

On the bus with the drinkers and the dreamers

And the daffodil and dandelion dandies

I think I just saw Alligator Andy

Speak of poem to a box of wooden matches

Now Andy's up from way down south by Natchez

In Mississippi where he found his luck was lacking

So he chanced upon a ride upon the back roads

With a prayer book and his grandma Emma’s banjo

In Tuscaloosa Andy slept inside a chapel

In a rainstorm by a statue of Saint Daniel

He found a carton full of alabaster angels

And disappeared into a night of crooked angles

Then he walked into the marsh at Loxahatchee

Where he got into a tussle with a caiman

But he walked out with a pair of river fishes

That he cooked upon a fire on a cracked dish

Andy ate beneath a moon of seven wishes

Then he laid down to sleep and thought of seven kisses

He placed upon the lips of one that he was missing

In a summer when his head had started spinning

And so he drifted higher off into the ether

Past Orion and a red dwarf growing deeper

He dreamed he lost the bag of alabaster angels

And had to swim across the Milky Way to get them

Then he gathered up the swimming drifting angels

And he placed them back into the satchel he was toting

Then he turned around and headed back to cold ground

And he stayed asleep until the break of morning

He woke up and noticed that a storm was coming

He scrambled off into a boxcar that was moving

Up to Baltimore he found this train was headed

Then he fell back asleep until the journey ended

And he thought about the red star growing deeper

And he thought about the rings of Saturn glowing

Till the boxcar opened beside an oak tree

Where Andy got out and the city wind was blowing

The Culture Industry

Are we the first society to wed the two words "culture" and "industry" together, as in the oxymoronic term "the culture industry?" 

Step 1 -- Apply the logic of factory manufacturing to the creation of the "cultural product."

Step 2 -- Market the ever-loving shit out of the shitty product through a squid- like network of big media contacts and an advertising blitzkrieg.

Step 3 -- Duck! As the avalanche of money from people buying and consuming often toxic "cultural products" pours in at an astounding velocity.
Step 4 -- Hire armed guards and invest in a state-of-the-art home security system to protect you from the people who bought the "cultural products" you sold and who may have gone mad as a result.

Hugo Ball, Franz Kafka, the University and The Singularity

"The war was based on a crass error.

Men have been mistaken for machines." -- Hugo Ball

The Dada artist’s quote is a precise diagnosis of the disease of the university department where I finished working yesterday. Metrics, surveys, rubrics, a swirling sandstorm of virtual tasks: these constitute the demented approach of many universities to everything from Spanish to History.  Students despise this environment of non-connectivity and resent the fact that they are paying a great deal of money for a teacher who is merely allowed to function as the administrator of an unending proliferation of impersonal tasks.

Indeed, I have quit my job as an adjunct professor of Spanish at a state university. The year is 2015. I sit in my home office with the windows open and a mild May breeze blowing through the screens.  Birds chirp -- at times with a consistent tone across their phrase, suggesting a declaration; at times with an uptone at the end of the phrase, suggesting a question. I ask myself: What is my psychic state after two years in such an absurd environment?  The words, “Kafka, Kafka, Kafka” chime in the chambers of my skull. The two-syllable surname, perfect in its assemblage of vowel and consonant sounds, rings like a strange bell.  Well, of course.  Invoking the eerie imaginary of Franz Kafka has become a cliché.  But it is for a reason: the slight man winding through the Gothic arches of Prague as the 20^th century dawned was writing tales which predicted our present malaise. Remarkably, they envisioned the psychological landscape of the job I just quit: a grim and inane and always-promising-but-never-fulfilling zone of despair that unspools dizzying spirals of frustration.

Kafka also divined what the much talked about Singularity actually feels like.  You know The Singularity – that shining future just over the line of the event horizon wherein humans merge completely with their technology to create a brave new being:  a post-human who soars as a gleaming falcon made of pixels and unseen digital pulses over what is left of the Earth landscape.  However, as Koyanisquaatsi writer and director Godfrey Reggio pointed it out recently an interview, if The Singularity involves the merging of human and machine, then obviously we are already there.   So much of our thought and action is now outsourced to the machine.  So much of our communication is now mediated by the machine. Certainly, the students at the university I have left and its Spanish Department are waist-deep in the great merging.  

For the students’ part, their willingness to detach from their devices and engage in conversation seemed to diminish with each passing semester -- creating an extra level of challenge for a foreign language instructor. And in a decision that defies the most elementary common sense, the Spanish Department  -- and, it must be said, the university as a whole, which is staunchly pursuing digital/hybrid pedagogy -- opted to reinforce student device dependency by funneling a great amount of work onto the web. It deposited the incessant self-evaluation forms, mediocre instructional videos, and a whole range of exercises into difficult to locate online archives. Franz Kafka described how endless waiting, endless strings of tasks which bear little fruit and, most sinister, endless distance manifests between people embedded in toxic bureaucracies. And all these symptoms emerge when the teacher-student relationship is outsourced to the realm of clicks and scrolls.

As if to intentionally increase the already present alienation, the Spanish Department where I taught enforced an absurd pedagogy currently in vogue, called the “flipped classroom.”  The idea is that, with their textbooks and through online activities, students are to pre-study all the grammar and vocabulary to be covered in the upcoming class.  Students arrive to class with the material well rehearsed and then can simply participate in challenging communicative activities managed by the professor.  Theoretically.  In practice, asking students who are taking a language as a requirement to assimilate sophisticated grammatical structures and new vocabulary alone, at home, and before class works very, very poorly.

In my 15 years as a language instructor, I have found the traditional approach -- wherein the professor presents and explains in an interactive manner the grammar and vocabulary, utilizing all along her personal connection with the students and presenting illustrative examples based upon what she knows of their interests –- to be tremendously effective.  And students do not resent this approach.  They even do not resent doing homework which reinforces the material taught in class.  In contrast, the resentment students feel toward having to teach themselves a second language and then arrive to class purely to engage in support activities is great.

But I have gone from the University, leaving the students and the department chairs and administrators to muddle through.  So, I return to the question that the chatty birds around my window had prompted in me: What is my psychic state?  As the days pass and the semester recedes into a dissolving digital mist, I still hear the word Kafka ring inside me -- but it is now interspersed with melodies by Django Rhinehart, a sense of my chest unclenching and the meditative silence I feel as I watch my partner paint a portrait of two pink dolphins gazing skyward.