Re: [-empyre-] Them/us in the context of bare life

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

there's an old saying: there are no atheists in the trenches. Under
sufficient pressure, the human mind centres on survival and the emergency
steps - like prayer  - that we leap to. Our Beloved Leader John Howard
last weekend enjoined the drought-stricken nation to pray for rain. He
must take credit for the 30mls that fell across soitheast Australia last
night

(In the context of God's will and another panic, consider the unfortunate
position of GW Bush. Since evolution doesn't happen, either bird flu will
not evolve to human strains; or it is God's will that it does. Either way,
preparing and stockpiling anti-virals is blasphemous).

The state of permanent war in Iraq is the emergency around which warlords
and preachers alike assemble their emergency responses: theirs not to
wonder why - or to debate causes and consequences. In this particular the
military and the imams alike work on blind faith. In catholic theology,
faith is a gift, a grace. It cannot be attained through reason. Once
equipped with the two or three fundamental absurdities - which faith
counsels us never to query, since they are beyond reason - you get
Aquinas, Chartres, the Abbess Hildegaard . . .

Could it be that the us/them dichotomy is as productive as belief that the
Son of God died but returs in the form of bread and wine? Or that it has
as much a claim to the status of an act of faith?

There ought not to be a symmetry between hardline deep ecologists and
totalitarianism. What they share is only the deployment of the state of
emergency. One must oppose totalitarianism with all the strength
necessary. The tactics for changing deepeco are not confrontatoon but
redirection

(and of ourselves - or myself - too: dawning awareness of the parallels
between product cycles in digital media and the planned obsolescence of
the motor industry in the 1950s makes me more aware of how i let myself
get swept along by the craze for the latest, fastest, shiniest toys. The
physical laws don't necessarily obtain in detail in social life, but "for
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" is a reasonable
description of dialogue

> Shouldn't  these painful, disturbing  ethical questions be considered in
> our
> aesthetic vocation without the gluing panic constructing the unseen
> justification of emergency laws which perpetuate technopanic?

I think I follow: is the 'gluing panic' the them/us dichotomy?

If so, is it affected in some way - for example by being remade
asexclusion from the techno -- when the vicious spiral reaches the
technopanic level?

s

> Them/us in the context of bare life
>
>
>
>
>
> I don't think there is symmetry between green politics and the complex
> binary of us/them.
>
>
>
> As Carl Schmmit said, the us/them, or friend/foe dichotomy, is the basic
> ethics of the democratic state in the western world.  It is a rhizome of
> inventive legal terms perpetuating the social structure of inclusion
> within
> exclusion.
>
>
>
> Does  technopanic generate totalitarian moves? Or do totalitarian moves
> generate technopanic? What are the formulative criteria for what makes a
> citizen and a non citizen, a solid dichotomy between the chosen ones who
> can
> practice and enjoy the good life, as against the ones who are bared
> beyond?
> Isn't it preferable to be included in materiality, as well as in
> virtuality,
> in the good life? Is it, at all, an option for a non western to join the
> fruits generated by the democratic western system, other than by taking
> menial slavish jobs in the democratic western states, in exchange for the
> remote hopeful belief in a better life?
>
>
>
> Why are human beings in the non western world so poor? Why a tiny minority
> desperately gives up their young lives to become suicide weapons? Is it
> the
> ideology of Islamic fanaticism? Or another fanatic religion? Could it be
> an
> emergency action?
>
>
>
> Shouldn't  these painful, disturbing  ethical questions be considered in
> our
> aesthetic vocation without the gluing panic constructing the unseen
> justification of emergency laws which perpetuate technopanic?
>
>
>
>
>
> horit
>
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