Entertaining the Apocalypse

I was at the Parkway 14 watching 2012 when an amusing thought entered my mind: what if the world were to come to an end this very moment, as I sit here in this theatre watching the same spectacular events unfold on the big screen? I smiled to myself as I pictured a shifting of tectonic plates tearing apart the floor beneath my feet, uprooting the foundations of the building, making a mirror image of the devastation on the screen.

My grin slackened, however, as it occurred to me that this fantasy contains more than the simple irony it suggests. In fact, this proposition shares in the perverse logic of wish fulfillment that motivates the film. Our apocalyptic imaginings emerge in this desire for life to be eclipsed by the violent intervention of fantasy. This desire, which is surely what brings us to the theater to see 2012, is also shared by the true heroes of the film. These are not the individuals who, through cunning or privilege, manage to escape the great catastrophe. Instead, they are the ones who stand toward it not only with acceptance but with anticipation, sacrificing everything for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic desire.

Some forty minutes into the film, we find ourselves at the rim of a sputtering super volcano. Our guide to this field of impending ruin is an ecstatic A.M. radio host who's instability of temperament suggests a similar propensity to explode. This manic conspiracy theorist, Charlie Frost, - who, incidentally, turns out to be the only one to correctly predict the planetary meltdown - is played by Woody Harrelson with a certain wild-eyed charm.

We join Charlie as he delivers his final broadcast, a beatific homage to the destructive forces of nature for which we in the theatre are the only likely audience. Having already refused an opportunity to escape the approaching blast, Charlie has reaffirmed his commitment to bear witness, both for his own edification and for that of his audience, to the first shot of the apocalypse. And as the hail of rock and ash begins to spew from the lava filled geysers, Charlie's mania reaches its peak. The camera moves in on his eyes which dart frantically trying to capture the full scope of the eruption. His speech is broken by a sudden shortness of breath, betraying an erotic response to the encounter. As he delivers the final line of his tribute, he is struck down by a flaming mass of earth flung from the heaving blast. This is the climax of our and Charlie's scopophilic thrill. Needless to say, it's a thrill for which Charlie is willing to sacrifice his life.

Though Charlie Frost isn't the only sacrificial hero of 2012, he is exemplary. We are invited to watch the global catastrophe unfold through the eyes of other characters in the film; however, none stand toward the apocalypse with the same sublime enthusiasm as Charlie Frost. But what is heroic about Charlie's self-sacrifice? Why do we admire him more than other characters in the film that grapple with questions of ethics and the continuity of the species?

The truth is that Charlie fulfills the obscene and therefore unspoken desire of his audience. He embodies the perverse impulse to see the future brought to a close, to seal off the horizon with one final fantasy. History provides us with a record of thousands of failed speculations on the world's appointed destruction; enough, at least, to suggest that this fascination is not a purely contemporary development. But, what distinguishes Charlie from these other prognosticators of doom is his singular excitement about the catastrophic upheaval of earthly life.

He asks no one to repent, he makes no amends. He isn't in despair over the imminent catastrophe and he isn't angered by the large-scale government cover-up. Like us, Charlie is only interested in the apocalypse for its entertainment value. But "entertainment" alone isn't sufficient to describe the depth of what transpires. Charlie achieves the ecstatic overcoming of all worldly concerns by embracing the destruction of history, the erasure of human life from the planet. As we peer through Charlie's eyes, we too are liberated from the antagonisms of our lives which suddenly appear powerless and inconsequential.

But what are these antagonisms, these traumas which we endeavor to undermine? The obvious referents to the spectacular disasters which animate 2012 are the highly publicized catastrophe's which have come to define our own new century. These events of global terrorism, natural disaster and ecological upheaval have, in fact, done more to tarnish our expectations of the future than our view of the immediate past.As is the nature of trauma, the subsequent anxiety issues not from the traumatic incident itself, but from the perpetual fear that it will happen again.

The global impact of these traumas is assured by the universal reach of our global communications systems. The 24-hour news cycle delivers a compulsive repetition of impressions surrounding these events: images, video sequences, sensational reports of the obscure aftermath. But, if these incidents are responsible for our most profound anxieties, how does witnessing their dramatic reconstruction liberate us from their traumatic effects? In re-presenting these disasters, 2012, in fact, proposes their ultimate fulfillment. Because it is an account of the final disaster to take place on the earth, it delimits the traumatic extension of indefinite anxiety. Perhaps the only thing more terrifying than the advent of a doomsday scenario is the indefinite progress of history toward no conceivable goal and subject to every conceivable catastrophe.

Charlie Frost's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the fulfillment of a cosmic order, a plan according to which the universe carries out necessary obligations. The perversity of this enthusiasm comes from a consent to absolute terror in exchange for a relief from anxiety. As we move forward in a century where the greater complexity of technology and greater correlation of our global relations will only increase the probability and scope of further disasters, we have to ask ourselves whether we will, like Charlie, succumb to the allure of the apocalypse or face the unsettling expanse of an indefinite future.

The Wisdom of Don Draper

“People may see things differently, but they don’t want to.”

I’ve been primarily occupied with two activities over the last week or so: 1) thinking through the 18th century debate between the British empiricists and the German idealists and 2) watching the third season of Mad Men. Happily, these two projects dove-tailed last night and provided me with an unexpected opportunity to enjoy both simultaneously. Before I explain how this happened, I’m issuing a spoiler alert for anyone who plans to watch MM season three (if you’re on the fence about it, don’t be deterred, it’s good).

Episode ten of season three opens with Don Draper indulging in a bit of philosophical pillow talk with his latest conquest, a demure elementary school teacher named Suzanne. Suzanne is recounting a story from one of her art classes. A student asks her, “how do I know that what looks blue to me, looks blue to you?” She answers, honestly, that she doesn’t know, though she’s delighted by the question just the same. She puts the question to Don and they briefly discuss how the problem relates to advertising. After all, Don’s success depends, or so it would seem, on the certainty of a shared experience – at least within individual target markets. However, Draper rejoins with one of his characteristic insights into mass psychology. He concludes, “People may see things differently, but they don’t want to.”

So what is the significance of this remark to the debate between the British empiricists and German idealists? By way of some background, let me first boil down these opposing philosophical positions into crude but expedient theses. For the British empiricists, all knowledge arises from experience exclusively and, subsequently, general truths (with regard to shared experience and even ethical maxims) are viewed merely as habits of thought, ideas arising from the force of custom rather than reason proper. For the German idealists, on the other hand, experience is regarded as the illusive domain of appearance, a chaotic mass given shape and order only by reason. Consequently, reason serves as the singular source of truth: a truth not given in experience but common to and accessible by all rational beings through reason.



The question asked by the student is a question which could just as easily have been asked by Kant or Hume. How do I know that what I experience is what you experience? For the sake of argument, let’s say that Suzanne takes the skeptical, empiricist position. She says, “I don’t know,” which, if you’ll admit the stretch, could roughly be the same as saying “We don’t/can’t know.” Since the empiricists hold that all knowledge arises from experience, there would be no proper way to know the details of another person’s experience. The experience of the other would always be an epistemological blind spot for the empiricist, hovering beyond an impenetrable void. All that can be shared between two persons is a sort of customary agreement regarding how to speak about certain phenomena. Such a discourse, however, could have no grounding in truth.

As the two consider the question in terms of advertising, they begin to think along the lines of the German idealists. Don provides statistics explaining that some percentage of people may see blue at one time while another percentage may see yellow. In the end, what they see is not essential. What’s significant is that both groups are united in their common ability to perceive color, period. Mass-marketing presupposes an order of basic human capacities. Differences of perception may emerge between groups in a given area or over time but, a common structure of experience - a unifying reason between them – allows marketing firms to deal with variables in perception rather than collapsing on the irreducible otherness posited by the skeptical empiricist position. German idealism, with Kant, outlines the structure and mechanics of this common capacity to experience the world. Though Kant agrees with the empiricists that all knowledge arises from experience, he shows that this experience is fundamentally ordered by faculties which attribute space, time and the experience of individuality to the tumult of the phenomenal world. Kant posits that these faculties are prior to experience and, therefore, reveal a common transcendent reason making order of life. Granted, Don’s position here may actually be closer to Pragmatism than German idealism but, for the purposes of argument…


Don’s final statement on this subject, however, suggests a move beyond both of these positions. Beyond the determining influence of sensible experience and the priori structuring of perception, Don introduces a third origin and force: Desire. In a quasi-Hegelian move, Don proposes that what’s significant here is a relationship between subjects rather than a relationship between subjects and objects. Here, what unites individuals is not a common structure of perception or the customary truths shared between them but, instead, their common capacity for desire. What is it that they want? Don says that people don’t want to see things differently, that they desire to share the experience of others. In this way, Don posits the existence of a third blue: the blue that I see, the blue that you see and the blue that we both want to see. There's a point here about commodity fetishism and the way in which capitalism creates material relations between people and social relations between things, but I’ll save that for another post.

Don’s proposition suggests a radical move. If we dig deeper, what can we see in this third option which the British empiricists and the German idealists never took into account? What does it mean to desire a shared experience with others? If we consider two individuals, both desiring the experience of the other, what in fact is the object of their desire? What gives significance to this shared experience is, perhaps, not its imaginary unity but, rather, the obscure force of the others desire. In this way, we might begin to speak of the individual desiring the desire of the other. It is both the influence of desire on experience and its peculiarly inter-subjective character which was overlooked in the by the empiricists and the idealists. Admittedly, there is a Hegelian character to this proposition, but it was not articulated as such by the great philosopher. Don Draper, on the other hand...

The Other Side of Time

I'd try any reader's patience if I copied every passage from Celine that moved me. I'm posting the following because it introduced a lucid moment into an otherwise disordered day. I also feel like it offers some consolation to the late twenties/early thirties set, if only to know that someone else has traversed the dark spaces of this time in life and managed to do so with eyes open. This paradox of clear vision in deep darkness is an important figure for Celine and I find it gives me a sort of hope, despite the often melancholic tone. Without further ado, this passage is from Journey to the End of the Night, Ralf Manheim translation.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

To be clear, I'm not encouraging a radical break with the past. But, I appreciate seeing the temptation laid bare in all of its metaphysical seductiveness. By giving voice to the desire, I feel like Celine relieves some of the anxiety that builds from its inscrutable force. I guess, in a sense, this is a typical romantic trope: using poetry to transform pain into a sublime aesthetic of self-reflection. But Celine's black humor keeps the reader from lapsing into a solipsistic enthusiasm. There's no heroism of spirit here, only an excess of vision that borders on the neurotic. And we are the beneficiaries of this excess. At least, I like to think so.

Knowledge in Equipoise

In his introduction to The Presocratics, Philip Wheelwright makes a rather profound point in the course of a brief aside. He's just finished explaining the significance of Anaximander's cosmological breakthrough - the philosopher proposed that "the earth is poised at the center of the universe, held in place by the fact that the universe extends equally on all sides of it," an incredibly novel theory given that his teacher, Thales, believed that the earth merely floated on interminable waters, thus suggesting an absolute up-down gravitational relation in contrast to Anaximander's more sophisticated notion of gravitational equipoise - when his attentions turn, momentarily, to a more characteristically modern question of social episteme and discourse. Wheelwright remarks that, despite the revolutionary import of Anaximander's astrological thesis, subsequent Greek philosophers continued to speak in terms of a "Way Up" and "Way Down," describing those cosmological parameters delineated by the Thalesian view. In offering a brief explanation for this discursive anachronism, Wheelwright explains, "Overt cosmological doctrines were, then as now, often combined with habits of thought and idiom drawn from another source." This other source, of course, is the pre-revolutionary past; the epistemological strata which survives its own refutation through a sort of discursive inertia.

However, the dimensions of this argument take a slightly different form if we apply it to Wheelwright's subsequent discussion of ontology among the Presocratics. Wheelwright argues that the "general ontological question of 'What?' is never a pure question: it rests upon certain assumptions as to the kinds of answer that are possible or acceptable." Here, Wheelwright again appeals to discursive limitations, though in a more radical manner. He explains:

Suppose that someone today, theorizing about the essential nature of things, were to propose the view that everything is ultimately electricity, or nuclear energy, or something of that sort: a listener, even if he were to reject the answer as too narrow, or even to dismiss the query as futile, would still regard the answer as making a kind of sense; but if the theorizer were to propose the answer that everything is ultimately water, or air, or an interplay of qualities like bright, dark, moist, dry, etc., he would generally be dismissed either as a fool or as a poet playing with fancies.

A new discursive force is identified, one which opposes the inertia previously described with regard to cosmological views. In approaching ontological questions, Wheelwright suggests that contemporary terms are privileged against their predecessors in a relation of rational ("making sense") to irrational (foolish, "playing with fancies").

A curious kind of tension emerges between these two points. Wheelwright appears to be saying two different things about the limits of knowledge and, specifically, the types of questions or investigations into knowledge we can attempt. On the one hand, our discourse is riddled with propositions which we know consciously to be factually invalid and even pre-critical. On the other hand, our critical practice is limited by what appears to be rational, as this rationality relates to contemporary views and technologies against the overturned views and technologies of past (and often present) societies and cultures. What then is the place (or time) of discourse in this push and pull against another discourse ("another source")?

Perhaps our knowledge spins in a sort of equipoise, rather than the absolute up-down relationship of critical progress against a pre-critical past. These other sources of knowledge aren't merely the shadow of our current enlightenment. Instead, what we know appears to balance in an acceptance/resistance of what we reject as knowledge proper. Such an Anaximanderian re-evaluation of perspective could prove just as relevant to contemporary questions of social episteme as it did to the questions of astrology which preoccupied that philosopher's time.

From Rene Char's "Artine"

To offer a glass of water to a horseman as he passes hurtling headlong on a racetrack invaded by the crowd takes an absolute awkwardness on both sides; Artine brought to the minds she visited this monumental drought.

Translation by Mary Ann Caws

I recently picked up Rene Char: Selected Poems after reading of Char's influence on Foucault in James Miller's controversial biography of the philosopher, The Passion of Michel Foucault. The first French edition of Madness and Civilization included one of Char's prose poems, "Partage Formel", as an epigraph and the introduction, later re-written by Foucault, included an explanation of Char's influence on the work, stating, "[for] a rule of method I have retained only one, that which is contained in a text of Char, where can be read as well a definition of the most urgent and reserved truth: 'I removed from things the illusion they produce to protect us, and left them the part that they grant us.'" An early member of the Surrealist movement and later a captain in the French Resistance, Char's biography and hermetic prose piqued my interest. What I've read so far in Selected Poems has been incredibly rich and rewarding of the patience required to parse the poet's dense prose. The above sentence alone has occupied by mind for some weeks now. Like Bataille, Blanchot and other French writers who rejected Breton's efforts to calcify Surrealism in the form of a modern cult-religion, Char's work reminds us that this movement still offers fresh insights beyond its more conspicuous novelties.

Shoving Off Into the Vast etc.

After a full year at dock, it’s high time Compendium Tremendium shoved off on its maiden voyage to the center of your kind attentions. In the spirit of this figurative adventure, I’m throwing caution to the wind and just writing. This blog was born from a desire to write and to write more, so there’s no use in my hesitating over the particulars of argument, audience and content. This will be my sole disclaimer for what follows. There are innumerable blogs which feature well-argued and compelling interventions into current events and polemics of all types and intensities. While I’m still too proud to say that this blog won’t be counted among their ranks, I feel nonetheless compelled to warn potential readers that nothing of the sort can be guaranteed. Instead, I encourage you, present reader, to regard these scribblings with the generous and itinerant gaze of the flaneur. I suppose this comes naturally to most web-based info-consumption, but just the same. Feel free to add comments if you’d like. Where appropriate, I will try to respond; however, I reserve the right to hold silent whenever I see fit/am feeling lazy.

More posts to follow… shortly.