III. GENESIS OF HUMANITY

The Emergence of Another Reality

The empire of economy long ago gave the knock-out punch to the symbiotic evolution of man and nature, and now that it’s falling apart, the path of the living has reopened. After the tyranny of work will come the primacy of enjoyment where life forms and perpetuates itself.

What was tied is untied. The complexity of the old world is getting dislocated in a clutter of peremptory truths the ridiculousness of which never ceases to amaze. How could we have suffered so, killed each-other, and died for so many inanities of puffed-up importance?

It’s all over for the gods, for fate, for the decrees of nature, for characterizing and categorizing people, for blind destiny guided by randomness.

The great theological, philosophical, and ideological systems that once governed existence, pushing it from Charybdis’ whirlpool to Scylla’s slavering maw, will soon be nothing but the dusty memories of erudite historians.

Beings and things spill out, simplicity flourishes in a new springtime, and the everyday starts looking like the landscape of a new world. The long night of abstract man is deserted.

The child grows along with the growth of a new consciousness, the satisfied weariness of love learns to come out again, and the smoke from the crematory of work dissipates, letting one see clearly the border between desire and constraint, where pleasure loses itself. Sometimes, the happiness of being oneself wins out over the boredom of not belonging to oneself.

Here begin great wanderings through newness, perhaps through its aberrations. Outside the scientific dissection that breaks it into atomized pieces in the light of separated thought, Life on earth and in the body is so unknown that lucidity and insipidity tend to be enmeshed for a time in the groping of new discovery, in the challenges of a new reality. What does it matter, we want mysteries that don’t harbor horrors:

Democracy

Nothing is left to guarantee the principles of democracy and the rights of man but the necessity of the global market to sell anything and everything to anyone and everyone. It results from this that the values of the past have fallen apart one by one, like obsolete commodities, even if their archaic debris is incorporated into the elaboration of an ephemeral modernism.

Subversion

The economy itself thus propagates subversion better and faster than a whole army of specialized agitators. All you have to do is take a glance into the spectacular shop windows where society exhibits its models of respectability and infamy — they hardly seduce anyone anymore besides a few shopsoiled specimens of kings, priests, popes, cops, soldiers, noblions, bourgeois, bureaucrats, proletarians, rich people, the miserable, the exploiters, the exploited... and it’s hard to believe that around such maggots great blazes of hate and admiration once raged; never before has any era of history been reduced to such a low price that it beats all the competition.

Lucidity

The 60s required a little more intelligence than was around then to decipher its social context. A little lucidity was necessary in order to perceive the signs of this bankruptcy at that time. Thirty years later, the winking eye sees at every turn, from one end of the earth to the other, the dilapidated decor, the usury of the spectacle, the ridiculousness of power, the fraying of roles, the loose string-ends of a pieced together economy. Half-assedness and boredom are dropping the curtain on this thousand year tragi-comedy.

The economy made and unmade the empire that men built by building their own ruin. Everyone leaves the coat-check without their expensive

disguises. There’s nothing left to do but march straight on, and preferably towards ourselves, with no other guide but the pleasure that sparkles in every moment of life.

Functions

The diversity of their societies rests on a few functions, so manifestly common to all people that they’ve been imputed to “human nature”. There are still a few minds around that proclaim that the lure of gain, the thirst for power, the taste for destruction and self-destruction are part of man as much as is the creative faculty is. This was a lucrative opinion not long ago. It has lost a lot of its interest since the devaluation of material and spiritual values.

If the weight of inhumanity wins out in human society, it’s not because of nature but because of denaturation. The intrusion, into the heart of Life, of the repetitive mechanisms of intellectual and manual labor, of exchange through supply and demand, the intrusion of the repression and decompression of desires, has inscribed upon gestures, thoughts, and emotions, the movements by which the economy takes hold of men and of their environment.

The expansion of the commodity has repressed the expansion of life, leaving no other way for it besides that of heartbreak, where what isn’t lived is instead lived abstractly, by means of roles, which are the tribute paid by the human to the inhumanity of economic functions.

Roles

The education of children channels the growth of desires. Far from refining them in trials of harmonization where affectionate relationships would predominate, it carves them into cubes the size of the stereotyped roles they hand them, makes them into conduits functioning according to the laws of exchange, exploitation, competition. Education drags the child from its pleasures to force it into a series of molds that make it no longer itself, but a representation of itself.

There was once a time when the colors and the vivaciousness of roles compensated for the prohibition placed upon the impulses of the body, when the violence of the sudden overflowings found a way to satisfy themselves in the practice of avidity, authority, and the renown that was attached to it.

It was thought, then, that to be born a baron or serf, to become an emperor or a trash collector, to climb to the heights of fame and honor or to climb the scaffold, was a function of history and fate, not of a conqueror’s logic progressing by means of inclusion and exclusion, holding only the marketable sacred and condemning only loss of profits. A certain “inevitability”, yes, but a premeditated, calculated inevitability, the resolution of a practice which was in no way divine or celestial.

The social spectacle permitted only existences which were tied up with sins, remorse, terror, guilt of having shone through the splendor and muck of glory and agony. One was a saint, a savant, a debauchee, a criminal, interesting in spite of being nothing when one was alone with oneself. A pious imagery maintained the vocations of nullity.

Life is hardly any richer today, but roles have degenerated into dullness and poverty. Who would respond any more to the drums of a religious, military, patriotic, or revolutionary calling? Who would don the emotional-armor uniform that functions to captivate attention and impose prestige, to direct the herd?

Ideas have evolved in such a way that whether the roles are played poorly or well they come from a conditioned reflex, a salivating at the sound of the bell. It’s a habit that one loses more and more the less one is treated like a dog as a child, or, if not like a dog, like a machine; and when the machine, itself a model of commodity perfection, is no longer the model of human perfection.

The End of Functions and Roles

Over thousands of years, they killed each other like fanatics, in order to hierarchize and label beings and things. They search from below to above and from left to right to find a place for man in the designs of God, and they only discover the position reserved for the product and the producer in each era of the commodity process.

Though they were intensely conditioned by the fundamental mechanisms of the system — the transformation of the life force into work force, the laborious division of body and mind, exchange, the competitive struggle to control markets — they were never the pure products of the economy that governed them. They kept in their hearts a grace of life that wasn’t reducible to commodity logic and commodity order — they reveled in that grace in ephemeral moments of love, generosity, and creation, and felt a sudden horror at the permanent calculation of ordinary existence.

Although the roles which maintained them on the social scene, where education and initiations had tossed them, often decided for them whether they would survive or die, how many times, when standing on a street corner, in a bar, or when leaving the office, how many times have they kept themselves from asking themselves what they were doing there, from discovering that they themselves inhabited their bodies, how many times have they not pulled back the curtain on the lamentable buffoonery of merits and demerits, not abandoned everything to set out on a quest for a fortune that has nothing to do with money or power?

What yesterday was nothing but electric potential, upheaval without a future, fits of madness or revolt, today has the allure of a more and more frequent and predictable reaction, now that the market of changes has made the market of social values collapse, devaluating all roles. What does it mean to “lose face”, now that both sides are worth the same, and what good does it do to freeze the body and mind in the grimace of an authority without arms or legs?

Authenticity

Authenticity is not a new reality; not even Kleist is an exception to this, Kleist who claimed he couldn’t be happy unless he was alone, since only that allowed him to be completely true. What’s new is the relief that authenticity gives one in the face of the total exhaustion of the social lie, in the face of the total dilapidation of the typed personalities that everyone was constrained to fit themselves into from infancy.

No More Stars

A few months suffice nowadays for a star to gain popularity and be discredited, whether their renown is in the art world, the world of politics, that of crime, or of society life. You used to have to wait a few years for that to happen, a few dozen years even. Glory is extinguished almost as soon as it comes into being these days. Back when reputations used to be long lasting, public opinion would hear about someone’s name and no one would worry about the techniques of personality-celebration or the machinery involved. The obscurity of so many existences lent a certain luster to a small number of people who in any other circumstances would never have been celebrated for their particular virtues. The splendor of monarchs, the stylishness of a supreme guide, the fad of a given author, kept in the shadows a staged setup that was conceived to give a fictional grandeur to the little men in power.

Media Inflation

I don’t think the talent for maintaining appearances has been lost. There are excellent artists around today who work in the art of fooling the people, but there’s less people who let themselves be tricked and overindulged, less means by which to sustain the great seductions. That’s because in spite of a disquieting fascination with images, the lie does not bite with the same vigor. The eye, the ear, taste, touch, thought, seem to glide over a plethora of cliches without quality which don’t let them fix their attention on them for very long.

A spattering of little tidbits of information which discourage full digestion, dishearten the consumer, and exhaust interest, corresponds to the overproduction of useless goods, which marks the commodity’s panic, the metastasizing of its cancer. And that’s when the appetite, refusing the indigestible blandness, awakens to more substantial hungers.

As the brain-sucking machine implodes slowly, its circuits engorged by the frenetic acceleration of the spectacle, its deleterious effects are perpetuated by the paradoxical bias of those who combat it. The fear it causes in people whose critical eye too often serves only for exorcisms and justifications of their fear of enjoying orgastically amplifies the size of the colossus and underestimates the weakness of its clay feet. Obsessed by the harassing idiots, they put all their intelligence towards idiotically fending off their blows. Their mockery hides behind one last habit of lies the hopelessly unclothed emperor. They do an even better job than the media at creating abstractions, ideologies, illusions, mystical and religious vomit; they unwittingly lend gravity to this encumbrance of obsolete values to which the melting away of commodity civilization has reduced it, and they treat as a futile whim the power of the desire to live, whose flowers, blooming everywhere, they constantly tread upon.

The Duality of Roles

The spectacle is suffering the subsidence of the social market. It’s selling roles at the low price power’s selling at, in all its circus shows — parliament, courtrooms, assemblies, State meetings — these are the loose threads, the strings that keep people’s curiosity up.

How can anyone really take any of these roles seriously, now that we can see them coupled together, arranged fancily, and sold in pairs, with interchangeable truths on the side: good and bad, brilliant and pathetic, hard and soft, judge and guilty, cop and murderer, State terrorist and private terrorist, priest and philosopher, reactionary and progressive, exploiter and exploited?

Lifestyle

Life has started to once again take on the colors of the eternal, to contemplate suddenly, in space and time, the alpha and omega of death: the flood of commodity-expansion, the earth devoured by an ocean of commercialism, the whirlpools where the generations follow one another, and time floats and drowns in the gain and loss of currency. Only a few summits have resisted the perpetual cataclysms of history, summits where the irreducible ferment of the human — infancy, love, and creation — has taken refuge, keeping alive the quality of being.

The cycle of incessant apocalypses is completed with the end of the economy. The wheel of fortune and misfortune which across the centuries turned around a self-same axle of war, misery, sickness, suffering, and bitter tomorrows is breaking. Those who think the universe is going to fall apart with it are perhaps right, but they’re so worn out from thinking it that they’ve gone over to the side of death.

For those who rejoice that there are no more flags, no more masters to think for, no more roles to uphold, this is the era of real authenticity, and of a life style that allows them to be reborn to themselves, to the enjoyment of whatever they want to live out.

A sweet, new style is succeeding the violence of refusal, investing the will to live with a stubborn energy, which is no longer the energy of hopelessness and dissatisfaction but that of enjoyment and the insatiable. It’s slowly left behind the character armoring, the mechanical gestures, the neurotic ignorance, the aggressive bitterness that once expressed the obedience of life to the economic. It’s moving as far away as possible from the social customs that make exchange win out over gift, power over affection, measured letting off of steam over the refinement of pleasures, guilt feelings over the feeling of innocence, punishment over the correction of mistakes. But if it considers such behaviors archaic and refuses them, it does not do so in the name of separate thought, of an intellectual part to play, or in the name of morals, since if it did, far from finishing them off, it would only retain the flavor of those behaviors. No, it refuses them because they are boring, and are troubling its pleasures; because, quite simply, there are better things to live.

Life Puts Itself in Play, And is Not Representable

If children’s evolution never ceases cultivating a diversity of new certainties, it’s only because it’s forming the roots for a humanity which will separate from its raw animalness without succumbing to the grip of inhumanity.

The growing hesitation of the child as it’s being brought up in schools where thought separated from life is imparted ever more uneasily doesn’t translate into a refusal to go down the path that has made their elders miserable beings, torn by twisted desires, scorched by a daily death and playing out their last roles in a parody of happiness.

Their attitude towards roles doesn’t come from the critique typically made quite willingly by adults, who see the negative so clearly that they can’t get rid of it. It’s easy to heckle those who delegate the responsibility for their happiness to a god, a potentate, a parliamentary representative, or a union bureaucrat, but they themselves are the real hecklers. Does the image they kill themselves in order to put out to the world not simply an expression of their denial of their own authenticity? Does it not contain the germ of the generalized lie of the representative and electoral system? Is it not almost as if, in their quest to ascend in their entourage, they were trying to convince it to vote for them?

Children only fall into that trap much later. They at first perceive the roles the adults don with imperturbable seriousness to be part of a game. They play cops and robbers and identify with both, in an identical pleasure. They are uninvolved as they witness the roles being played — from judge to accused, doctor to patient, weak to strong, master to slave, good guy to bad guy. The game of metamorphosis and disguise, that is, the supposedly moral lie of the story, belongs to a symbiotic background wherein beings and things are tied together by the common movement of life.

To the extent that the game stagnates, that gestures are impoverished in the mechanical ballet of money and promotions, the child is instantly asked to make for himself an identifier-image, to fit in with accepted social reasonings. The pleasures of this metamorphosis enter backwards into a fantastic reality as long as the adolescent, at last fixed to the choices and orientations that the whims of the economy impose upon him or her, keeps in his or her heart the impression that s/he has opened the wrong door and that all the other ones that s/he didn’t pick would have been better.

Constraint and the boredom of always trying to show oneself to the world from an interesting and interested angle — to show off, as the kids would say — today discover their peremptory uselessness in the bankruptcy of the social market and of its traditional values. Once again, the return to childhood identifies with the temptation to be reborn to oneself, in the plurality of desires and in the unity of life, in the human metamorphoses of a recreated nature.