Why is an apocalypse easier to imagine than post-capitalism? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

All sociological topics not appropriate or suited to other areas of the board.
Forum rules: No one line posts please.
#15101059
Why have even utopian imaginings given way to post/apocalyptic art/media? Why is there seemingly a limitation on our imaginings?

Or are there such imaginings but they aren’t dominant in pop media? Why is death a simpler answer than change?
#15101236
http://rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard ... irit-1990/

Kierkegaard says “Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death”. You may notice that Woody Allen, you know, constantly despairs and frets, but it really means he is just a hypochondriac, he’s not going to die from despair, but I have made that point. “On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die”. This is not an argument for suicide, it’s even worse than that. Suicide won’t help either, for Hamlet’s kind of reasons. “Thus it has more in common with the situation of a mortally ill person who lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, and yet not as if there was hope for life, but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die”.



I am going to try to use two genre of horror movies to explain the difference. Does anybody remember the old B horror movies, or even the, sort of, Freddy… the 13th… The big danger in them is that you will die. I mean that’s what everybody is trying to avoid, and that’s what generates the fear. But that is not the fear generated in the new near fiction science fiction like Blade Runner. In Blade Runner, the greatest hope is to be able to die. You know they won’t let you. They will cybernetically make sure that you’ll be around. They will record your image and save it, shoot it to rockets in space, and the desire to be obliterated, to die a concrete death, becomes an almost utopian hope.



Now, you are going “Oh, you are crazy Rick, that’s too… I don’t understand it, it’s too weird”, it isn’t! Why do you think apocalypse movies are popular? Because they are scary? Uh-uh. Mad Max is exciting because compared to the boredom, the banality and the despair of everyday life, in this kind of society, what could be more exciting that an apocalypse and fast stripped down cars, shoot Mad Max across the desert and a return to… it’s not that the apocalypse horrifies us at all. Now by the apocalypse I am not speaking biblically. We have technologically achieved the ability to create it long ago. Don’t worry about the atom bomb in that sense. It’s old fashioned technology by now. You know, it’s well within the reach now, as we know, of… peripheral countries can build them. We are scared of that, but it’s old fashioned technology.



Apocalypse movies create in the audience… and it’s pretty easy to see when you go into them with younger people who are less ashamed to show their emotions. When the big boom goes off, that’s great, it wipes the slate clean and now we can start the movie. Here’s Mad Max and these people running around and the desire for death is the greatest hope here. That’s not… these kids are not going to die from it. But it is… that desire is even a source of pleasure and joy.



Under such conditions moments may arise, Kierkegaard argues, in which – when we really face ourselves – the hope would be to find a way to die. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t commit suicide, but that wouldn’t even solve it. You would be too worried. You would say “What will the kids do after I am gone?”. See that wouldn’t solve it either, because what has structured you is this despair. It is you. That’s again why, you have a lot of therapists, but they can’t fix this Kierkegaardian problem. It is not a mere psychological problem, it is a structural condition of the self. My argument here is that under our modern conditions, it is quite general.



So, apocalypse movies – on this kind of account – will give us a social compensation for this inability, for this despair. Now they will also give us a thrill. Things could be otherwise, there could be the big bomb after all. I mean, it’s joked about. It should be. In a way… it’s one way to express this very despair. It’s joked about. The more frightening movies, as I say, are movies like Blade Runner. Where a very near future is presented in which you, like all other commodities, will be recycled. Where that is the greater danger – not to die a death in despair – but to live a life that’s not human.



The real danger is one that is summarised beautifully by a theologian friend of mine at Duke. The old problem of Theology, which has always been closely connected to Philosophy, as you may know. The old problem was the unbeliever; the non-believer. The new problem is the non-person. This Kierkegaard had already foresaw… you know, had a foretaste of. It isn’t the problem of people not believing, it’s the problem of finding people. Are there people? Do we want to call these beings that are walking around “people”? And that isn’t… can’t… and I don’t want to make this sound elitist. That can’t be said from a standpoint separate from you being one of them. You know, raised in the same televised culture, where the simulated images of the “real” are just as “real” as real, and sometimes more “real” than real.



I mean, it is not a problem about which one can be an elitist in any sense, because it is quite generally a social malady, in much the [same] way as the massive support for the war now could be understood as some social malady of a certain kind, like shellshock; the reaction of people struggling to be sane in insane conditions. Despair is a reaction of people struggling to be human in inhuman conditions.



ell there is a point here, and a very deep one. We have been tracing throughout here a series of human projects, and yet we have not yet faced the greatest danger: that if the story of the development of society in the late 19th Century in its broadest sense was the replacement of manual labour by machine labour in the advancing countries of the world, the story of the 20th Century will surely be in part, and in broad strokes, the replacement of intellectual labour – thinking, and even feeling and emoting – by machine labour.



In a society – and this is the point I am making – in a society where images count to that extent, what it means to be a subject… what it means to try to find a project… gets to be re-understood in terms of what it means to find the right place to buy the clothes, the best place to go to school, the right kind of accent to use, and who to get to know. It becomes a matter of fashion. For Kierkegaard, that was rather despairing. He thought that humans driven to such an extent – driven to that extent of, ah, socialisation; hyper-socialisation – would greatly prefer death, but would pretty much unable to pull the thing off.



Now, the despairing way to look at it is that we have become useless, however that is only in the scale of values I have been criticising. In other words, we would become useless in the sense that they don’t need our labour. That’s the scale of value I have been criticising. And I think part of the giddiness of this situation within which the need for humans to do certain things is becoming erased in society through the advance of capitalism; technology, if you want to put in a cheap way. Ah, the other side of that is the giddiness of the possibility of freedom. I mean after all, freed from manual labour doesn’t sound so bad, freed from mental labour doesn’t sound so bad, especially given the boring kinds computers do! You know, computers do a lot of bookkeeping and a lot of numbers stuff, and who in the hell likes that! Well, I mean, you know, there may be someone who does, but they can still do it as a hobby, you know. If they have got to keep some books, they can still do it!



But the other side of this social system, which seems as it were to squash out what was understood as human values. And I mean now in the broadest sense, insofar as humans thought… something, did… something… begins to squash that out. The other side of it is the need for the necessity of some of these things disappears and leaves open possible projects of freedom again, but at another level now. What those would look like – what they would be like – would be much different. They can’t really be talked about. Just like the social situation I am trying to describe is difficult to evoke, because we are in the middle of it.



You know, it’s always hard to evoke the present because you’re in it. It’s kind of like the, ah… aquarium fish trying to describe the aquarium. I mean, it’s home, you know, “Here I am, there’s a “. But what we would need, and what we cannot have, in my view, is a view from outside the aquarium, sort of looking at it, where its limits are, and its boundaries. In this situation, the one I am describing now, and trying to connect up now as the third part of my social account, and the scariest probably for me, is the culture that – many of you have heard this word – the culture which is postmodern.



In a totally commodified culture – I have mentioned, you know, phone sex and that sort of thing – in a totally commodified culture, it’s hard to decide whether you have just adopted a fashion, or you are developing as a person. In fact, how you could argue between the two becomes very difficult in a culture like ours. Does it mean more than you now jog and do diet pills. Does it mean something more? It becomes difficult to say what more that is. That attempt to articulate meaning finds all these bizarre outlets.


http://www.guidetopsychology.com/identity.htm#5

Real life—not the glossy advertising-agency image of “life”—on the other hand, is an embracing of all the uncertainty of your unconscious, an acceptance of your essential vulnerability, and a willingness to risk everything to trust in something far greater than what you “think” you are.



“Whoever knows how to die in all things will have life in all things.” —St. John of the Cross
#15111215
Philosophy / philosophical treatments, unfortunately, are both ahistorical and also take an *abstract* approach to the psychology of the individual, while the individual him- or herself may vary greatly in individual psychology / mindset, and life-path qualities, or personal history.

Additionally, we can't ignore the *class* interests inherent in commercial / corporate / mass-media products, like movies ('post-apocalyptic'), etc.

Finally, 'post-capitalism' is implicitly a *class*-delineated category -- a potential future timeline after the successful overthrow of the capitalist ruling class, by the world's *working* class, ushering in a *post-capitalist*, collectivist kind of social productivity.


Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show
Image



So, to spell-it-out explicitly, the corporate ownership of mass-media entertainment products like movies has a *class interest* in not portraying any *optimistic* treatments of future social life and lifestyles because such social optimism necessarily implies a social *collectivism* of some kind, to some degree, in order for various kinds of prerequisite *social production* to get done -- otherwise how could social life get better, if not from improved and increasing social production?

Conversely, the *pessimistic* worldview is the only one we see now in movies that deal with the present or future, because such pessimistic treatments are more *individualizing* of social life -- for whatever of that may still remain in our pandemic era -- which is more conducive of the present-day, bourgeois capitalist-class *status quo* that's based on balkanized, constrained accumulations of *private property*, and the accompanying *solipsistic* / postmodern worldview.


[EDIT: 'Conversely' instead of 'obversely'.]

In my opinion, masculinity has declined for all o[…]

Russia-Ukraine War 2022

So have people given up on blaming that terrorist […]

@ingliz good to know, so why have double standar[…]

...Or maybe because there are many witnesses sayin[…]