As we turn our attention for a moment, and look at the globalization of industry and commerce that is now an ongoing affair --- one in full swing --- we can see how the Myth of E-Progress is also about the increasing collectivization of the economies and technologies of distinctly different sectors. This all means that the new socialization process is not a political affair; it is economic!

It is not the least bit ironic that the capitalists that railed against Socialism are themselves the ones who are initiating a new Capitalist-style Socialism. Again, a political engine does not power the new socialization; it is economically powered and driven. We are newly socialized around economies, capital, and commerce. What politics and ideology could not accomplish, economics and markets are.

The major emblem for this new socialization of power and capital is, no doubt, the multinational corporate structure. These newly decentered/globalized institutions are subsuming all other interests under their own; which is economic growth and progress. The progressive dictates of the new socialization process require the localization of capital in order to power the engines of progressivism. The decentered, multi-national corporate power structure is the localization of capital heretofore unseen on such a scale.

Capital deigns to grow to a peak all alone. At that peak capital reaches a point of diminishing returns; the brick-wall of growth requires capital to join with another capitalistic structure, one which broadens the power base and allows the new entity to reach progressive heights that alone neither of the players could. The newly merged corporate entity of capital, with the broader base of labor, and the vaster network of connections, by rights includes more within its domain. The newly merged capital entity has more power, a greater capacity for growth and economic progress. The formerly and once separate corporate components bring to the table skills that were lacking in the other. There is a cooperative exchange at work here, where prior to this merging, there was a competitive exchange. A good example of this is the merger of the German-based company Daimler-Benz with the American-based Chrysler Corporation. The new entity, Daimler-Chrysler is a more powerful corporation, a multi-national-a global enterprise. This entity is a more significant corporation, one that is built upon the cooperative efforts of what used to be two competing corporations. This sort of merging of once competitive entities is now a new global phenomenon.

Where politics failed in merging cultures and nations, economics is succeeding. The new socialist agenda is manifested in the sphere of capitalist economies. Surprise! Even the conservative efforts of extreme right-wing groups cannot dismiss the socialization process that is subsuming all prior social theories and political ideologies --- both those that are left and those that are right of center.

Frederic Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism, writes that "late or multinational or consumer capitalism represents the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas." What Jameson is saying that the multinational nature of capital that we are now in the reign of is subsuming previously untouchable domains. The tribal peoples don't wear animal skins anymore, but can be seen wearing the jersey of a Micheal Jordan or a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Cocoa-Cola. The national borders are collapsing and surrendering to the re-socialization process offered by multinational capitalism. This all signifies a new social order, or a resocialization of the globe --- something that has never been witnessed before. And of course it breeds immense confusion as well. Our sense of place is rent asunder when our home is rendered homogenous with its cookie-cutter rows of fast food joints and franchised outlet stores. Where is home when Nature is being subsumed under the multinationals and culture is all the same anymore, inflicted with the pop syndrome of mass consumerism.

The free market has indeed freed us from the clutches of Nature, while throwing us into the maw of a flattened cultural landscape where small town Georgia looks strikingly similar to small town Idaho. And both are home to icons and logos that can be found on any continent (with an exception for Antarctica).

Between those golden arches we still spot a slice of distinction, a sense of place off in the distance. Maybe a far off hill or an old town hall, a church or a rising steeple. Between those golden arches and to the right of the Marlboro Man we can still spot a sense of place, a slice of diversity under attack, encroached upon by minimum wage labor camps --- convenience stores and fast food chains.

Jameson, in drawing a distinction between the preceding modern age and our current postmodern epoch, echoes a sentiment that Ken Wilber also voices. "The first and most evident [difference] is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all postmodernisms."

In a fundamentally economic sense, depths are inefficient. Depths are economic disadvantages. They cost time and money. The efficiency and speed of postmodern capitalism requires high tensile surfaces that can only rightly be called "superficial". Not only is the postmodern a flattening of depth by the leveling of all former values, it is also a movement that echoes a resounding sentiment: In the new age we abhor depths, we want nothing to do with the hiccups that depth introduces into the efficient and smooth-running system of postmodern capital. We are efficient producers, proud engines and cogs, gears and information links. Depths just cost us time and money. They are unacceptable.

If we look to the major icons of globalization, such as the trademarked icons of popular culture (McDonalds, Cocoa-Cola, etc.), we notice that with few exceptions there is an "abstract" application of a franchised element into previously alien territory. Something that works here is applied there. It is the main element in franchising that what works here will work there; that a consumer here is like a consumer there --- just a potential accomplice in the economic two-step of "late capitalism".

This all helps to create the superficialization of the globe, where the ethnic and local are subsumed by the abstractions of the multinational --- the newly emergent global corporate structures of "late capitalism". At the same time that the multinational serves to superficialize the former depths of the diverse, it also spreads its own wealth, i.e., progress and growth. By subsuming all culture-depth under the multinational heading, that multinational icon grows in force and the cultural landscape becomes flattened as a result. The tribal tongue is replaced by the corporate agenda. The native-song is lost under the din of the latest infestation of corporate sin-song. The homespun story is taken up by the multinational mothership and given a touch-up. Ronald McDonald is beamed down into diverse locales as the signifier of a new order. The wayshower of the peoples. Come drown the sorrows of a lost and forgotten culture with some fries and a shake. The local spice and flavor, replaced by the global do-gooders spreading their good news of the multinational one taste. And who can fight that power? Who dares to stand in front of what Jameson calls "late capitalism". It chugs along like a steaming locomotive, whacking the native species along the way; like those who slaughtered the Buffalo to make for an easier expansion from East to West in the United States of the late 19th Century? Take away their source of food. Make them dependent on the system. Easy control. Old, old, story. Broken record. Forgotten past. Doomed to repetition.

There is a hiving mentality within most global operations, or what we'll call "multinational corporate structures". The unspoken rule is that the hive doesn't compete with itself. The hive competes only with other hives. And all workers in the hive, all elements of the hive, work for the good of the hive as a whole (which in this case is economic growth, market share). If the hive succeeds, then the workers, or the elements in the hive, are rewarded. If the hive fails, then there is no reward for the workers, massive displacement and relocation, lay-offs. There are many divisions of labor within the hive of the new global entities. All the various divisions of labor have their function and their tasks to perform for the overall efficiency of the hive. The global entities take up, gather, transform, and put to use what they have subsumed. The diversity of a Rain forest becomes transformed into a livestock plantation, which will produce cheap beef, which can be stuffed into the tacos; tacos that will be advertised on the TV and the radio, targeting the ranch hand who helped raise the cattle on the plantation which replaced the Rain forest which is no more in the land that Nature built.

Create dependencies in the people. Sell back to the needs which have been created in the people through displacement and devaluation. Profit from the creation of that dependency, temporary fulfillment, dependency, temporary fulfillment cycle. Capitalism.

The multinationals of "late capitalism" are diversified beasts, leveling other interests, superficializing global depths in pursuit of progressive capital. The Myth of E-Progress is a directive engine that is fueled by growth. There must be something else to subsume, consume; the multinational engines are just as tied into consumption as the consumers they serve; just on a far vaster scale. Gobbling up forests and fields, rampaging across the Arctic, rummaging through Siberia, subsuming all other interests under one heading: the progression of capital leading to the complete re-socialization of the globe.

And we thought Marxism was a threat. Ha!

 

28

Confucius is said to have said: The reform of society begins in the reform of its language... So, if we are getting worse, we are getting worse partly because of linguistic callousness.

----James Hillman

Is it at all possible, if we can bring about slight adjustments in our languaging of the life world by resolving our "linguistic callousness" --- how we frame and formulate questions --- that, in turn, this will result in our experience/perception/communication loop evolving/resolving by leaps and bounds? We definitely know how fundamental language is to conception, and also to how we all "picture" the world.

How we perceive and interpret data is very much a languaging phenomena. We language the world into becoming through our langauged interactions. Our questions: languaged and languaging. Our responses: languaged language. Our effortings: again, languaging language. We are steeped in language, enfolded in language, unfolding in utterance and tone. Languaging is a socializing phenomenon. And if we leave it up to other interests --- multinational entities of E-Progress --- to language the world for us, then we should know that we have surrendered our song to others; to external sources once again.

Michael Ventura, in discussing censorship, which is a languaging issue, states "That's the real reason for censorship, whether it's the direct censorship of the state or censorship-by-dismissal: the less you allow to be expressed, the more alone and cut off people feel. When certain feelings are unexpressed in the culture, people think those feelings are bad or crazy, and so they trust their feelings less; hence they're more vulnerable to pressure form above."

So, do tell, how can the resocialization of the globe, according to solely capital interests, not lead to repression and dissociation, among other fractured failings of a psyche drenched in symptoms? A loss of depth through superficialization; global relocation of biodiversity via iconographic pornography; that is imagistic isolationism, which cuts cross ways with our ability to express intrinsicality. The above is the repression of depths which are cast off and cut out at the heart by the acceptable standards proffered as the new ideological imperative: efficient operation of the "late capitalism" info-machine.

The fact of the matter is that the leveling of the external depths corresponds to a leveling of internal depths as well, depths that issue forth as feeling. When we feel, and are no longer able to locate a referent in the external world for that feeling, because it has been engineered out and replaced by capital interests, we are left in a state of psychic dissociation and fragmentation. The inner and outer do not jive, they are no longer in synch. The inner feeling state is unable to locate a referent in the environment because that referent has been subsumed by multinational corporate structures: the new Church, the postmodern Mothership. In this way, the lifeworld of inner and outer is increasingly discordant. The outer has changed to such an extent that the inner no longer finds resonance with what is perceived. We are in a newly alien environment because our Ground has been clear-cut by multinational interests. The former referents of cultural mapping are no longer around; they have been uprooted and displaced by the interests of Capital, the will of the Market, the impersonal forces of Greed.

In this way, the inner dies to the outer. Dysfunction results as the movement to locate referents to match the inner feeling states are unlocateable; those interior dynamics have no referent in the external world. What is a self to do in such a situation? Stranger in a strange land: the psyche has been banished. The cultural and bio-ecological referents that lent stability to the subject, to the psyche, are gone; to be replaced by a talking Chihuahua and a dancing Col. Sanders selling us back our needs --- again and again and again. Fast food appeasement for cultural genocide. Fair trade.

 

29

Most postmodern schools of thought have declared the "death of the subject". Apparently the subject proper is deemed to no longer exist in the new postmodern epoch. Yet this non-existent subject sure does manifest a lot of psychic symptoms; symptoms which seem to correspond with certain external indicators (like we have just clarified above).

What are we to make of this situation? Nietschze proclaims, in the modern era that "God is dead", and now his offspring in the postmodern era proclaim the "subject is dead". Effectively, the resultant metaphysics is a "metaphysics of objects" and the reflection and interpretation of one object to and with another. The punctuated equilibrium has effectively been rendered inconsequential, because there was never any equilibrium to begin with, and if there had been --- well, it was a false equilibrium; a fiction derived from the belief in a "GOD" and his "Subjects". The Kingdom has fallen, been deconstructed, leveled and flattened, rendered impotent and non-existent. A metaphysics of objects; a bunch of "its" interacting, with a further reduction to "bits" now on the horizon.

Jameson refers to the postmodern displacement of gods and subjects as the "latest mutation in space". He states that "postmodern hyperspace --- has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world".

Previously our location in space was mediated by Nature, if not Gods and a specific community --- or, rather, all three. With the effective removal of all three of these components from the postmodern landscape, the ability to locate ourselves in relation to space is rendered, not as an ability, but as an incapacity. Now, for what its worth, our ability to locate ourselves in space, and the cognitive maps that we build to help locate our body in relation to space, are derived from consumption and the consumer culture. We orient ourselves in relation to the fast food joints and the shopping malls. Our new landmarks are not the mountain peaks and the flowing rivers, or the lush valleys and the golden fields, nor the ancient cultural artifacts and familial origins; no, our new landmarks for spatial orientation are the commodities and the markets --- what we can consume and what is marketed, what we are drawn to purchase and what we can afford to consume. We become spatially oriented around what we wear and where we eat, who we are seen with and the Market sector we are invested in. We become the postmodern landscape; we spatially orient ourselves to that.

And still the demons from the past that haunt us in the wilds of our imagination; those ghosts of a wild yesteryear are now just hoary figments of a past that cannot be quieted; a past that has been amputated, subsumed and taken up by multinational interests and the resocialization process of "late capitalism".

More and more it is the Market that is identifying us. We are becoming demographic targets --- mere purchasing traits left over after all of our consuming locates us in the Market. We fit into a group not by what we profess to believe in, but by what we buy. The Market, more and more, is defining who and what we are. (The outcasts are those who still retain a sense of what the market is not including.) The fringe-dwellers become those who are clinging to the subject, a god that the market has no room for. For the commodities we can afford are the new gods. You purchase your god. Your god is the one you can afford.

Jesus is nowhere to be seen. The moneychangers are back in the temple --- no, they own the temple; they have a mortgage on the temple. Jesus is in the wilderness; where moneychangers fear to tread without the armor of machinery to protect them.

We can see, then, quite intimately, how our spatial orientation no longer points to, nor refers to Nature. And I would offer, not even to Culture proper. No, our spatial orientation is now referenced in relation to the Market. Where once we used to draw spatial relations to the stars, to the seasons, to the cycles and to our "relations with the wild Other", we now spatially organize ourselves in relation to the freeways and byways of an ever increasingly commodified culture that is image and icon driven, that is Market and Capital motivated. Nature is just a two-week vacation. Nature is no longer foregrounded. Nature is backgrounded in our commodified culture. Nature has been conquered. By the lords of commerce --- Nature has finally been conquered.

 

30

The descent is dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake. What happens when you get there is something else, which can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it... You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and and your body.

----Frederic Jameson

What Jameson is suggesting is not alien to anyone who happens to read this text. We have fallen into this "hyperspace", this "milling confusion" that pinches on us as subjects with a sort of "vengeance". We haven't yet caught up to the changes in the environment. Jameson goes on to state just that very fact, when he writes, "there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by an equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace."

The Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote, "New organs of perception come into being because of necessity. So, necessitous one, increase your need." I am not so sure that Rumi could not be illuminating the necessity of our time: That the swirl of hyperspace, the whirl of hyperreality, the flood of icons and images, and the displacement of former referents is creating a need is an unequivocal fact. Our need has been increased. Let's pray that Rumi was write and new organs of perception will soon follow.

Seeing hyperspatial relations in the above light illumines the nature of co-evolution; of how the subject is moulded in accordance with an alteration in the objective world. In this case, our current milieu, the external environment is altered in such a way that "we" as subjects are forced to comply with it or perish. That is just the way it is. Adapt or die. It's evolution baby! The impetus behind the Myth of E-Progress.

If we recall the pace of change in relation to Nature, whose subtle seasonal ebbings came upon us gently, and compare this with the onslaught of acceleration in the hyperspatial nature of postmodernism, it is little wonder that a sense of "milling confusion" greets us in our descent "through the roof". The rate of turnover and the demands placed on us in this new-to-us hyperspatial sensorium are necessitating perceptual evolution. Accordingly, our former perceptual organization in relation to Nature is passé in postmodern terms. Our techno-offspring are running ahead of us and we are perceptually-gasping to catch up. I am reminded of the passage from Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen tells Alice that "one must run as fast as they can just to stay in the same place."

Well, welcome to hyperspace dear Alice.

Jameson points out that there is "this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment" in hyperspace. And that this "can itself stand as the symbol and analog of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."

Where are we?
In the web of communications.

Who are we?
But a simple strand.

In the informational matrix of a Body?
Yes, in the in-formational matrix of the Body.

All of this languaging could just be another fanciful prescription from another ideologue. Yet, in our languaging is our world languaged. The very culture we have built is a residue of our languaging; which are our meanings-given; which are the knowings resultant from the questions asked. Ask another question and yet another knowing is offered, which means something else entirely; which will be languaged accordingly. As David Bohm was fond of saying "A change in meaning is a change in being".

When where we are as a collective means something else to us than what it does now, then the being of that collective will coincide with the meaning of that collective.

Meaning-full war leads to beings of war. Meaning-full markets results in beings of markets. A backdropped and backgrounded Nature results in beings that have relegated the meaning of Nature to a mere backdrop and background; a mere launchpad for the upward rush to newly define the subject in relation to commodities and the Market. Consumption is you.

Jameson tells us, not just a little to our surprise, that "The surrender to the various forms of market ideology has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. Everyone is now willing to mumble... that no society can function without the market... it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time." While religious leaders and political aficionados haggle over their terms of ideology the various forms of market ideology more or less have converged as one on the global stage. Again, what politics and religion have failed to do, which is unite people around an ideology, the Market has quietly progressed to the culmination of that very direction. We stand as one under the banner of one or another multinational icon. Not Virgin Marys, nor rosaries; the Nike swoosh and the golden arches of MacDonalds are the symbols uniting the peoples of the world.

It is the markets that we want to get into, as nations and as businesses, as mutlinationals and as venture capital financed start-ups. "Show me the money!! Show me first quarter profits! Show me we are in the red!!" Whether it is the Peoples Republic of China and the Communist Party or the United Arab Emirates and a princely monarchy, the market has won over all other ideologies. This is an unprecedented achievement in the history of the world. Even Alexander the Great didn't march this far. Market-driven economies are the greatest ideological force the world has ever seen.

If the Gods have indeed been rendered impotent and dead they may have reincarnated as pop icons. It is in the interest of the market to produce icons. Image-making is as much a favorite past-time as there is in hyperspace. The image is worth a thousand words, and communicates a history, a power, a potency, and a communal spirit. Go to any foreign country, and though you may not speak the lanaguage, you could still communicate in global images, via Marlboro and Levi's, KFC and Pizza Hut. The barriers to communication and difference are somewhat obsolete in a popular culture sense. Popular culture is not limited to the United States or Great Britain anymore, to France or Western Europe. Popular culture has gone Global. One of the major exports for the United States are the movies, movies seeded with popular images and pop iconography. Certainly this sweeping populist wave can be noted as a leveling of diversity and depth, as other cultures are subsumed by the popular trends, but it also gives rise to the removal of barriers. Our political and religious leaders cannot agree on politics and religion, but they love a Big Mac with French fries and a Coke; and are quite fond of the way Madonna woos a crowd, and Julia Roberts lights up the silver screen.

Was the Second Coming
Already come?

Did Christ return
As fast-food conglomerate;
The spirit behind popular music;
A lilting song that even the most
Hardened heart couldn't resist?

We have seen the transcendence of our former gods and cherished ideologies. The nature of market-economies has seen that consumerism and trade have subsumed both religion and politics. It is unquestionable. We gather around our Fords and Harley-Davidsons, our favorite sports team and the movie stars, all with the religious devotion we formerly set aside for the gods, the kings and the queens. Our communal spirit is market-driven. We live where we can afford to. We are identified by our purchases, pigeon-holed by last years buying habits. The heights of our historical ideologies have been overtaken by a more powerful force. Who's the New King of the Mountain? Why, none other than the Market itself. Commodities and exchanges. Goods and labors. The Market.

Jameson calls the market "a Leviathan in sheep's clothing; its function is not to encourage and perpetuate freedom but rather to repress it." He points out that the market has become a "consoling replacement for divinity" and wonders why this "should be so universally attractive at this present time". My guess is that after two thousand plus years of one ideology pitted against --- of one following another --- that the human psyche has just had it with blatant ideologies. After all, by all appearances the Market ideology is a bit more innocuous than Marxism or Catholicism or Islam. After Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and various other Utopian drives, ideology just leaves a bad taste in the mouth of most humans. After all of this time we finally know when we smell an ideological rat. And we want nothing to do with it! Give us the innocuous Market and Consumerism!

 

31

My personal suspicion is that the majority of Western intellectuals just don't get how appealing market economies and consumer goods are to the majority of the worlds population --- especially when it is sold with Disney-style hyperrhetoric, i.e., "the Happy Meal"; "have a Coke and a smile". Of course, after growing up in the West most intellectuals have seen the various negative side effects of rampant consumerism and market inequities, so it appears to the intellectual that there must be a better way (and as intellectuals are wont to do, that better way is theoretically understood and spouted off as if it is almost a reality in its own right!). The main point is this: For whatever reason, it is hard for the intellectual to understand that he or she is already where billions of starving citizens of the globe would love to be... in a warm home with Mother Hubbards cupboards full of goods --- forget the labels!

The insides of a consumer-driven culture may not always be pretty, but to the majority of outsiders it is a virtual paradise. The fact of this truth is revealed in the numbers of aliens who attempt to sneak their way across the border, along with the overwhelming number of citizens who apply for political asylum and seek immigrant status in more or less free market economies. The land of milk and honey is here; here where the Market runs wild and free.

Though the intellectual would tear down the very culture that supports such intellectualizing --- and in relative luxury --- vast numbers of all too ready consumers long to sow their seeds and collect some fruit from the Market. If there is any honesty in the world for the people --- it shows up in the Market. God is dead, but damn.... Life is good! The land of milk and honey. The New Jerusalem. Zion. Consumer heaven. A shoppers paradise.

Just ask someone along the border, trying to sneak into where the goods flow freer. They know. They know what an alluring appetite-inducing effect that the mere sight or knowing of all of those goods has. The Market, where it runs most true to its innate course, is both a Heaven and a Hell. Oppressing the nations where raw goods are gathered are cheap labor is secured while providing luxury and opulent riches for the Market kings and queens back home; which could be just about anywhere now that the Market is accessible globally.

There are many examples of the desperate human sneaking off to the market to have their shot in the consumer heaven. There is even the sense of a not so coincidental merging of religious sensibility and economic gain at work here. The new God has come to be the one who rewards us through economic gain, through a more stable flow of desirable and necessitous goods through our home. God and the market go hand in hand here, and are, in fact, almost inseparable. As I have stated before, and as Jameson has put so well, the "market has become a consoling replacement for divinity". I would go farther than Jameson and state that the market has come to be the divine incarnate, is that system of divine operation in our world right now. Though, not for all peoples could this statement ring true or even be considered sensible. But the fact of the matter has been born out historically --- the market has snuck in the back door of the global palace and ascended to the throne while various religious and political ideologies were warring for the title of "king of the world". The not so subtle market --- that production, distribution, consumption cycle --- has won out over religious salvation and political posturings. The people have voted. It is unanimous. The Market is our newly crowned impersonal King.

I am going to go out on a limb, and suggest that, even though we have all sorts of differences --- personal and cultural and environmental differences --- that the one great unifying force at present is this amorphous and abstract impersonality called the "market". With few exceptions there is not a country nor a nation that wants to be left out of the globalization game via Market investment/involvement. Without considering if this is good or bad, let's just assume that this is the case: that getting into the Market in whatever fashion or manner available to the collective or the individual is what matters most now. And that even those who oppose the Westernization and Capitalistic Resocialization of the globe are, as nations and groups, willing to define themselves in relation to the market --- albeit, at times, in opposition to the market. This all-just goes to show how powerful a force this is, this "global market", this new "consumer ideology".

No political or religious affiliation can deny the influence --- the overwhelming influence that the market has on the world as a whole. And this influence is only going to grow. It is not an influence that is on the wane. The market economy, the new "consumer ideology", this is waxing into full moon status: we have not glimpsed the peak of "market" yet.