Non-Buddhism

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. — Mario Savio

Here are some rough reflections on the role (the place, the way, the dao) of the Stranger Subject during this time of darkening in the United States. This subject is equal parts Heretic and Future: a heretical thinker, artist, activist, inciter, a future-mystic, future-bodhisattva, future-Christ, future-Übermensch.

I feel that we are entering a time where the only(?) adequate response is refusal.

Refusal begins with the firm conviction that “no, this is not acceptable.” It is, in Herbert Marcuse’s words, “the protest against that which is.” I imagine that many of us feel this refusal deep in our bones. (Many of us feel it even during liberal regimes; but some of us don’t feel it until we are at the brink of a radical right totalitarianism.) The question, for me, is always: what form should the protest take?

At times, I believe, it should take the form of active protest. In Savio’s words:

You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

I am sure that response is being planned in numerous circles as we speak. And it is important that they do, although I fear it will be very dangerous this time around.

At times, the anarchists’ call to direct action should be heeded — we take matters forcefully into our collective’s own hands. A lot of us responded to Trump’s first term in these two ways.

Personally, I am feeling refusal take shape in a different way now. It is a refusal to behold the spectacle. I will avert my eyes. I will not permit my desire to be captured and manipulated by the endless — endless! — spewing of the spectacle. More than ever with a showman like Trump, the spectacle is indistinguishable from the state. And what is the means through which the state-spectacle is injected into our nervous systems? Media. And today we carry the media machine in our pockets via our phones. And so consider: “The average American spends 5 hours and 24 minutes on their mobile device each day…Americans check their phones on average 96 times per day, or once every ten minutes.” (https://www.zippia.com/advice/smartphone-usage-statistics)

Nietzsche had something to say about the role of media in our role as a member of the social herd. For him, the state-spectacle intravenous-apparatus was the newspaper. The two, state and newspaper, exist in a symbiotic relationship:

The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.” Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft — and everything becomes sickness and trouble unto them!

One day, Zarathustra stands at the gate of the City of Information. He is met there by a “foaming fool,” a description that applies to anyone who is a long-term citizen of the city.

“Oh, Zarathustra, here you have nothing to find and everything to lose. Why do you want to wade through this sludge? … Here great thoughts are boiled alive and cooked until they are small.”

The spectacular City of Information “steams with the stench of slaughtered spirit.” It is a place where souls are hung out to dry “like limp, dirty rags.”

And it is out of these rags that newspapers are made.

So, my first act of refusal during the brutish days that stand before us is to smash the State-Spectacle-IV-Machine afixed to my arm. I believe that doing so is not at all inconsequential. It frees up tremendous stores of libido — the desire that fuels drive — and allows me to create work that just might amount to salvos of another kind of resistance. It enables me to avert the slow suicide of all — the despair, fear, and energy drain that is the goal of the totalitarian regime. In short, doing so allows me to live, and to share with others, what may be genuinely called a life.