NEO HUXELIAN....

Six years after the global capitalist revolution and the felling of the Berlin wall came another revolution to speed up the process of ‘liberatory modernism’. Netscape was delivered wholesale to those with Internet connection. The Internet, which was relegated to academies, military, and stock markets, now was placed in the hands of all individuals who could afford it. Modernity as algorithm achieved a greater expanse and freedom of mind, yet the conditions of the modernist city placed a burden upon the body: with the cultural pluralism found on line the body was still subjected to unemployment, sexism, racism, unfair marriage laws, and other vestiges of the pre modernist past. The intellectual tools for understanding of biological psyche and its abiding ‘chi’ (with all of the attending archetypes) were turned on the very individual itself. The ‘algorithmic’ process could now be used for straightjacket behavior, induc self-repression, and provide a means of sequestering the vulnerable body. A general pattern of ‘disembodying intent’ became even more pervasive with the growth of the Internet. The tyranny of the crowd became the tyranny of the behavior and thoughts of the international petite bourgeois with often more stringent conditions of behavior than were found in the agrarian societies or even industrial.

The revolution of 1989 seems to have split into two directions. There is a world of true, meritocratic excellence and democracy for the citizen…. and there is a world of internalizing ridged noticed algorithms that keep the citizen’s behavior in check: self-surveillance. Which one do we choose? Both. What is its effect? To channel energy…ancient energy into commodity fetish to the point of the fetishizing of the narrative content of a life itself. OCD autobiography. Why not? What are we left with but epistolary selves…. human capital and the creations it makes is the next commodity in the new ‘creative economies’ of the world. What will we use to heat our homes? Dunno.

The ground breaking work of Freud, Reich, Jung, and others in the twenties and thirties led to a concept of the biological self as a being to manipulate: the principle manipulation comes in the form of advertising to fuel the commodities based free market economies. The end ideals of the BMW driving global urban yuppie is apart as an ideal for all who attain an education and who wish to ‘arrive’ at a global notion of success. This is the Huxlian world of consumption on credit…until.untill what? The personal debt crisis has already frozen the economy of the Americas and Europe…. what are we entitled to as a ‘fuel’ to further expands these economies of expectation? Will the individual arrive and transcend their local customs, values, and respond to an often-repressive insular society? Modernity in itself was a philosophy brought into being by the German philosophers…Kant in particular…. and put into practices by the atheist civic deists of young America and France which was the first country to experiment with the nation states. Now it is pervasive worldwide…but what were the ideals?

Through all of this…especially in the liberatory and democratic practices of modernity ….the individual was educated, coached, and processes a drive find certain ‘truths’ about self-actualization and individuality and then to put them…. the truths through discourse…into practice. This could be to the ends of the ultra literate individual connected to the world and judging it…or having that time share in the Hamptons or the penthouse in Kangnam or Mumbai. Why not? What had existed in the biological hominid for about two million years was not ‘free to maintain and develop’ certain algorithms of the modernizing process. Class warfare, gender discrimination, racism, and other apriority feature found within the locality were attacked…and…in the process of a modernist education that strove for the ‘liberatory discourses’…found within the modern liberal education…overcome. Yet what has the straightjacket of these modernist algorithms done?


What has been lost?

Probably nothing. Except more of the same without the factory foreman or the field taskmaster. You are that better than they.