Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

5.12.09

on struggles

It occurs to me that the general consensus of the world is that the inhabitants of this Earth enjoy the conceptualization and the actualization of the struggle. So much so, that this enjoyment of the struggle precludes (and would ultimately negate) any sort of true, total resolution of that struggle.

Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.

Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...

Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.

Crossroads or a standstill.