The Real Thing

One of my initial reasons for starting this blog was as an impetus to write and to sort out my thoughts, particularly with reference to Maurice Blondel's philosophy of action. Here's an interesting link to a piece in the Guardian newspaper which very effectively illustrates the perils of blogging, particularly about action, as blogging has effectively become a trendy substitute for action without the political affects or symbolic efficiency of real political and social movements. The piece itself is just a random collection of mass protests described by the author as "the best and most significant." The last protest listed was the Athens Polytechnic occupation, wherein the protestors insisted that an element of what they were protesting was precisely the virtual culture of blogging instead of acting thereby making an  "assertion of the real thing against virtuality."

That being said, I don't believe that a protest, even a mass protest is necessarily any less impotent a factor of shaping reality than a blog post. I know people who have gone to protest rallies primarily for the "experience" which represents not so much a concern for social life as a desperate plea to feel some kind of emotion. To paraphrase a tired Marxist maxim: "Experience is to philosophy what masturbation is to the sexual act." Neither, however, should we get caught in the trap of visiting intentions. The road to hell...

One should certainly stand by the protestors in refusing the pseudo-experiential nonsense of virtual reality (mimicking experience in a disembodied medium). Rage is a consequence of social oppression and brutality. But in a precise sense it is misleading to call the events of the protest "the real thing" which expresses a kind of banal "look at us we actually did something." Slavoj Zizek, in his essay Organs without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze, points out, following the work of Deleuze, the importance of the reality of the virtual, which is to say the real effects and consequences. Zizek is referring here to more than merely the electronic-scape of the internet or blogosphere or something. What is meant by the virtual (or Virtual) should be understood, in a sense, as the realm of the Possible as distinct from that of the Actual. And here Zizek makes the very Blondelian point that how this virtual realm is actualized (through human action/perception) is at once reductionary and expansive. He uses the example of how the human eye perceives light to make the point: The human eye reduces perception because it has to process or actualize light in a certain way, and yet the human eye expands perception by inscribing "what it really sees into the intricate network of memories and anticipations." 


In Lacanian terms the "Virtual as such" is, in fact, the Real. One might say "the Real Thing." And here we should think of Thing as possessing a very slimy and alien quality. In Franco Berardi's brilliant essay Cognitarian Subjectivation, which delineates the relationship between labour and capital in the information age and poses the question as to whether an autonomous, collective self-definition is even possible, this Real is described in the following way: "Capital becomes the generalized semiotic flux that runs through the veins of the global economy, while labor becomes the constant activation of the intelligence of countless semiotic agents linked to one another." 


This semiotic flux, according to Berardi, leads to a hyper-accelerated sphere of stimuli which cannot be processed in the "organic time of attention, memory, and imagination" with the result that the emotional sphere linked to cognition is cracking with devastating consequences. One might indeed say of the Athens protest that it is one of the fatal consequences of the "Real Thing" that is Global Capitalism. 


We live in a world that is panicked and confused. We have become ungrounded and need to land. By writing this post I add to the confusion. This is not the autonomous place. The cognitive overload on the social brain as well as the particular brains of people do not need yet another blog effusing scattered information and a randomized perspective. Yet, as a particular choice, in the matters selected and the perspective shaped, perhaps this will prove enriching. If only to say that we need to slow down, we need to learn to process the world with a greater level of intensity lest all our emotional energies be drained on the vacuous pursuits of infomational/emotional commodities.  

Chronicles of Narnia and the Imperialist Dogma of a "New World"

 Growing up C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia were a staple fare in my literary diet. I was familiar with, and largely uncritical of, the standard evangelical interpretation of these works, namely that it was the story of Christ transposed into an imaginative and magical world and good triumphing over evil and so forth. Later on I came to resonate with Tolkien's critique of the works - that they made the Christ-analogue too explicitly and literally thereby weaking the literary effect. Recently however, the Chronicles have returned to my thoughts, this time as an exemplary case of British Imperial propaganda. I have not developed a thorough reading on this level, it is more a series of thoughts, some of which may be slightly incoherent. One of the reasons I have been reflecting on this though is that I do think Lewis articulated, in the Chronicles of Narnia, a vision of North American Christianity that has been very destructive and continues to hold the Church in its thrall. It is a vision which disposes of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge and expression and subordinates them to a particular kind of imperialist Christianity.

The character Aslan, on a facile reading an analogue for Christ, is in some ways much more in line with a certain rendering of the Arthurian myth, or some of its historical suppositions. One of the accolades Aslan receives -son of the Emperor across the Sea- suggests the figure of a Romano-British Arthur. At another level the accolade lends credence to a British ascendancy in North America, particularly in Canada. Aslan the ruler of Narnia(i.e. the colony) is the legitimate authority because he is the envoy of the Emperor from across the Sea (i.e. Britain.) The fact that Aslan is a (British) lion is not amiss here.

Under the auspices of this same lion the British are present at the very creation of this world. There are, notably, differing views among those present as to how this world is to be shaped. The (evil) magician Uncle Andrew sees it as an opportunity for exploiting wealth, whereas for the child Digory it is a much more wholesome fantasy. In the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe British children once again make it onto the Narnian scene this time as its destined rulers.The Land of Talking animals, which is a northern woodland and reflects certain First Nations stories about Raven, Coyote and so on, is created and ruled by a foreign animal associated not only with Christianity but also with British Imperial rule. The tie with British children and fantasy makes the connection even more explicit. Narnia is an analogue for North America, which Lewis sees as rightly under the rule of the British empire not only politically but also religiously and mythologically. Though here it is a particular rendering of British history that Lewis employs and it is one where the figure of Arthur and Merlin are conflated in Aslan thereby rendering null the indigenous history of England itself, that is, if one is to allow that Arthur represents Roman Christianity and Merlin an indigenous Celtic tradition. I think there is some warrant for such a reading even aside from the dubious history of Arthur and Merlin themselves.

Thus, in a nutshell, Narnia is not so much the story of Christ the Messiah, as it is the saga of European/British rule in North America not only politically but culturally/spiritually. Aslan, representative of a Britain whose entire history and tradition was subsumed under the colonization of Rome, is the author and guarantor of Narnia, representative of a debased North America created entirely in the image of the old Empire. Thus the myth of the New World perpetually denying the voice and history of what went on before it was "discovered."