The Myth of E-Progress infiltrates consciousness to such a degree that there becomes only two conditions in Life; one is progress and is good; the other is regress and is bad. Armed with the Myth of E-Progress it is determined for us that there shall be no looking back; that the road is up, up, and away; that more is better, and tomorrow is a brighter day because we are progressive in our outlook.
The Myth of E-Progress dictates our movement in space-time; movement as consciousness, movement as desire. We are educated into the Myth and the Myth is repeated again and again. It becomes a song in our head that repeats endlessly the refrain that "progress is good-the only good". If we are stuck --- that is bad. If we backslide --- that, too, is bad. If we don't make progress, then this is bad as well. We must improve. We must ascend to higher and higher heights, greater and greater victories must be won by the progressives. We shall progressively overcome! When the spherical bounds of the Earth are encountered, then the Myth of E-Progress says, "Move. Move on to the Stars.... The distant Planets. Your next progression. Go... Progress onward to your next destination." No wonder we have never felt at home here on Earth. No wonder we are always displacing those cultures that have felt at home. No wonder we are never at ease with rest; leaving ourselves to unwind --- to regress in stillness. No wonder we are such an anxious lot. For we have a song playing in our heads... endlessly. It is a progressive tune... playing us into the bondage of never-ever arriving ... never-ever really arriving anywhere. For progress does not allow it: The Myth of No-Arrival. The Myth of E(ternal)-Progress, as long as we live with it as our guiding dictum, our postmodern "Manifest Destiny", will require of us that we colonize more and more territory. That which has already been colonized and rendered as commodity is sufficiently conquered. The next step in the progression is to colonize more territory, to displace the local inhabitants from their specific environments and to render it all as a new commodity in and for the Market. There is profit to be gained from the claiming of territory --- be it virtual, as in cyberspace, or not. Profit comes only from the progressives, and increasing marketshare is a progressive endeavour; one that may include efficiency maneuvers or the implementation of cost-cutting procedures --- but that is not regress, never regress. Regress is the loss of progress, the end of progress, the leveling off of increasing profitability and capitalization. Holding one's own is not even "good" per se. Progress is all that is good. Or so says the Myth of No-Arrival. "What's wrong with progress, though? You make it sound as if all progress is bad. What's up with that?" Of course progress is not all-bad; yet progress as an always and all the time endeavour is an illusion of the greatest order. Progress costs. And being progressive all of the time exacts a price from that which fuels Progress. The price of Eternal Progress is paid in full, comes at a cost --- is paid socially and culturally, individually and collectively. There is no Progress without fuel... and the fuel of Progress is that which has become colonized by the Colonial and Imperialistic Super-Structure of the newly decentered Postmodern Market-place. Bodies: hearts, minds, souls and dreams are all heaped into the roaring furnace that generates steam for the Engines of Progress. In fact, the newly colonized become those engines, become the raw matter that fuels the growth of the Market that oppresses those very persons and cultures that are the colonized. John Bellamy Foster, in his book, The Vulnerable Planet, clarifies: The colonized are fuel for the growth requirements of the capitalistic centers, which in our time have become newly decentered global operations, operations which transcend nationalistic bounds and are only Imperialistic in relation to capital and markets. The colonized can be peoples near or abroad, ecosystems, habitats, minds. The colonized are those who are re-educated into the ideology of the Conquerors; stripped, displaced, deterritorialized --- reeducated. Good consumers.
The displacement of the Native cultures of the Americas fueled the expansion of second-hand European vulture-cultures into the land from which the Native cultures were displaced. That displacement of the Native allowed for the colonization of those lands, and the resulting commodification of those lands and those peoples that were once consciously and inextricably wound up and embedded within those very lands that were conquered by the Imperial nomads of second-hand European civilization. The current species must be displaced: Colonialism. And if they can fuel our ideological motives so much the better: they will be used as resources for the New Agenda. The Empire expands. It lives inside as propaganda turned religious fervor. "Techno-economic revolutions solve all ills." Faith in the ability to reconstitute Nature, toying with the Fates, tempting the wrath of the Gods, colonizing the Psyche in the same way that Nature has been displaced from Nature, child from mother, husband from wife, lover from beloved, sibling from sister, brother from bonds of blood oath taken in summer park turned paved lot for so many empty hulks of plastic and steel that thunder and roll across the desert seeking refuge from the postapocalyptic nighmare of alienated fragments dancing through bardos asleep at the wheel. Dukkha. Suffering. Return of the repressed. Nature eating at the insides of the self-aware Bodies who cannot silence their Self. Return of the repressed: Nature breaking colonial chains, Psyche driving crazy the captors. Both poison for the New Agenda, antidote to the virus of ideological campaigns. The colonized: engines, production machines, oppressed, fuel for multinational growth --- the Injuns of Progress, driven by the whip and the rifle, the threat of survival, and genocide. "Just do it." The Nike slogan that signifies to the rich of nations that "there is no tomorrow", that "today is the day", that "now is all there is". So, "just do it". While to those who manufacture the apparel and the shoes that carry that slogan have a whole different sense of the slogan "Just do it"; like "just do your work and don't question authority". In other words "Just do it!" Cultural and economic relativity. The Colonial Divide, where sentiments signify distinct realities. The words are the same; what is meant by those words differs, accordingly for wearer of shoe and stitcher of shoe sole.
"If I can crush your Spirit, then your Body is essentially mine to do with as I please." Because the Spirit is no longer here... for there are only bodies, object-commodities here in this world --- or so say the Colonizers. Their God has sent them; sent them to divorce Bodies from Spirit. For the Colonizers have been dispatched by a distant and detached God to further displace Spirit from Bodies, to disengage the Bodies of the people from the Spirit of the place. The Colonizers ride into the Spiritual Wilderness and deterritorialize the indigenous inhabitants; Bodies are displaced from the Homelands, as the former Spirit-Body union becomes severed, rent asunder, eliminated via the efforts of those Imperializing structures born of Colonizing minds sent to conquer these lands by a distant and detached Patriarch. In order to effectively colonize a people and its culture it is imperative that the Spirit of that people and culture be crushed under the heel of an iron will. Separation works most effectively. By displacing Bodies from Spirit control can be won, for a Body with no Spirit is a Body that can be controlled. The main effort is to eliminate the Spiritual sustenance of the newly colonized peoples; which means the elimination of Spiritual freedoms; which means divorcing the Body from its Spiritual Ground; meaning, that the Body is separated from the Homeland. For most colonized peoples have a Spiritual bond with a sense of Place, a specific locale or region, and isolating or eliminating the self-aware Bodies of the colonized from their Spiritual Soil has been the surest way to conquer peoples and cultures; to possess bodies for labor and fuel that will expand the Empires of Ideology. We know that the Colonial Progression needs fuel, needs bodies, needs those resources so as to fuel the Imperial Engines. The fuel --- those bodies--are won by dis-joining Spirit and Body; which means that Bodies are severed from Spirit. The Ground of Being-Becoming which births anew each day is the Spirit. Spirit is embodied in SpaceTime as the Homeland. But for those who have no Home it is imperative that Progress continue, for Progress has come to replace that sense of not being at Home in the world. And not being at Home in the world is the ever-unconscious motive of the Colonizers; which is why they move on and conquer like rapacious nomads displacing Bodies from the Spiritual Homeland, the Ground of Being-Becoming-Embodied.
We now know that in order to take control of bodies one must separate Spirit from Body. This can be done by deterritorializing the Bodies from their Spiritual Ur-Ground, or can be done by crushing the Spirit by a show of extreme force. In essence then, the Spirit of a peoples is forced to flee the brutal force and barbarian tactics of the Colonizers. And once that Spirit departs, then it is virtually effortless to get those left behind Bodies to do what the Colonizers want them to. And most often the Colonizers just want the bodies as re-sources for the Imperial Engines of Progress the grow the Empire. "Just do it!" The Spirited quotient of Bodies is strong when those Bodies are conjoined with the Spiritual Ground that has given birth to those Bodies. In other words, the Union of Spirit and Body is strong-braided when the Body and Ground are one in an intimate bond of familiarity. But once the Body is displaced from that Ground though, and the Body loses that intimate bond, it (that Body) becomes ever more susceptible to control and manipulation by the Regimes of Oppression. This very fact is known all too well by those indigenous peoples whose Bodies have been displaced from the Spiritual Ground from which those Bodies were birthed, and nurtured therein. The Colonizers come upon the Ground from outside, and then displace through force those Bodies of the indigenous from their Spiritual Ground. Once this is done, the Bodies of the indigenous can be controlled if not outright eliminated. As for the Ground, it becomes co-opted by the Imperialistic Order, made to conform to a new regime that sees the Ground not as a Spirited Home, but as so many commodities that can further the Colonial Empire through expansion, i.e. Progress, Growth. The beginnings of the second-hand European populating of the globe began with the endeavour to open trade routes. The various European empires sent out fleets of sailors and caravans of marauders to discover new, and much faster, trade routes with the Far East and sub-Saharan Africa. Even here we see how it was the Market, and competition within the Market which was determining the exploration and investigation of Earth and the various peoples and cultures populating the Earth. It is often assumed that it was some great and noble exploration that inspired the various discoveries of other cultures. It was nothing but greed and one empire fighting with another for prestige and recognition, power and influence, goods and gains, progress and commodities. There was nothing noble and honorable about the adventures that opened new trade routes between East and West (and surely not for the indigenous inhabitants who quickly became displaced from their Spiritual Ground, oppressed in chains, and shipped across vast lands so as to further the Empire of one or another despotic king or queen). But it does make some of us feel better if we imagine that there was some noble effort behind all of the discovery and exploration that took place as one European empire after another came to dominate the peoples of the world. Even the North Americans --- the noble democracy --- is bound up within the European ideological paradigm of colonization and conquering of distant lands to fuel growth for the capitalistic centers of power. It is a historical fact that the Continental United States has been won by greed and barbarism; which some call "destiny". It is relatively plain and simple: the noble historical stories we tell ourselves after the fact are cover-ups that we use so as to make ourselves feel better about who we are and where we have come from. In other words, we focus on the appearance of heroism and the nature of adventure when it is was out and out greed and avarice that led to the conquering of Spirit and the displacement of Body from the Spirit. The Ground that has been won has been won with the blood of peoples... not the nobility of nations. The Spiritual landscape that has been co-opted in the name of greed and gain wears the mask of 'objectivist dogma'. The Spiritual landscape --- the Ground of Being-Becoming-Embodied --- devolves through the 'objectivist gaze' into so much Market value, so many potential commodities, so many numbers in this or that account in the name of this or that empire, this or that ideological king or queen. The Imperial doctrine that we have engaged in has become so pure that fathers dream of empires in relation to their sons, and mothers dream of marrying their daughters off into the empire of someone else's son. In other words, the Empire gives birth to an intelligentsia that seeks to make and map out little empires within the Big Empire --- the Totalitarian State of the Market --- profit and gain, progress at any cost --- maybe even your loss. We grow up speaking in that tongue; languaging the world. We even engage spirituality and religion to gain, to profit, to make of our experience a more valuable commodity. Growth. Progress. Gain. Colonize the Psyche. Speaking the language of the Market we wag tongue in the breeze, singing songs of winning and losing, of gaining and wasting, of pros and cons, of economic heights and depressive lows. These songs are sung for the Empire, for the gain of the greater good, for the will of the faceless masses symbolized by one force that has now come to overarch all other lesser themes and dogmas: Now, all other ideologies are subsumed under the One --- the ideology of Market Progressivsim. Early retirement and 365 days of golfing in Palm Springs. The Ideology of Market Progressivism has become, in many respects, the new Global Dogma. The entire world over there are persons and nations of persons who are bought and sold, traded on the ideal of Market Progressivism. It doesn't matter that you are required to go into debt in order to get into the system. It doesn't matter that you are required to mortgage your future in order to get an education that may or may not be highly valued in the Market by the time you get out of school and are ready to hawk yourself as a newly educated commodity. It doesn't matter that we continue to feel that we can gain at anothers expense. It doesn't matter that we still look for the best deal, hoping to find someone out there who doesn't know the true worth and value of what they are selling and what we hope to purchase at bargain rates. It doesn't matter that the information we have means that we can gain over our competitors. We win; they lose. Such a tired game. It doesn't matter that the Market determines worth and value; that is the way that we want it. We want the Market to decide, because people cannot, and people should not be able to determine what is the true worth and value of the 'objects' of the lifeworld. Bellamy Foster writes that "It is not the ecological principle that nature knows best but rather the counter-ecological principle that the self-regulating market knows best that increasingly governs all life under capitalism." It is up to the Market to decide. It is up to the Market, the determining factor in our lives in relation to values.
The Market is Up!
The Nature of Dukkha
The Market is Up!
The Gods of Mara
Nothing is free in the Market. If it appears that there is something free in the Market, well, that is only the "apparently" free worm that is attached to the Market hook with strings attached. The worm looks free, but it comes with a catch, a hook in the mouth. People of the Market don't just give stuff away unless it is a marketing tool meant to get someone hooked into the system, along with their pocketbook. Nothing is free about the Market. The Market extracts a price for the appearance of freedom. Rule number two: You must pay a price for Market-freedom. We have thought and been taught that freedom is just that... free. "And you mean to say that it is not?" It depends. It depends on what we want to be free to "do". If we want to be free to purchase and play in the Market, to take advantage of all of those commodities offered therein, then we will have to pay a price for that freedom. Freedom is not a given in this marketed world. That is a lie. According to the Market, we all must earn our freedom. In many ways, we could say that we are all indentured servants in relation to the Market and its "impersonal hand". We can be free, but only so far as the Market lets us, and according to the rules of engagement that the Market employs in the region of our socio-economic habitation. Rule number three, then, is: The price one must pay for freedom is dependent upon what one wants to be free to be and do. We are not just alone and merely free to do and be whatever we want. There is a price involved in our market-choosings. In other words, the greatest of freedoms may cost us the most in relation to the Market as a whole. While the lesser freedoms come with what appears to be little or no cost at all. Or stated another way, the freedom that is won in the Market, that allows one a greater capacity for Market freedom, may come at a greater cost than those freedoms that appear to offer one very little freedom in relation to the Market. Freedom to perform and be invested and involved in the Market can extract a great toll. The freedom that we gain so as to purchase commodities, so as to be involved in the Market, comes with the price of freedom apart form the Market (if that is at all possible these days, as I highly suspect it isn't). Our freedom in the Market, to pur-chase goods and commodities of the Market costs us the freedom for self-determination apart from the Market. The determination of value and worth become allied with what "the Market says". Rule number four: The greater ones Market involvement the greater ones determination of worth and value according to the current state of the Market. There are certainly relative degrees of involvement with the Market. The greater that ones involvement with the Market becomes, then the greater that ones sense of worth and value will be determined according to what the Market states. "Market up?" I feel good. "Market down?" I jump out fiftieth floor window. It is also the case that the less that one is involved with the Market the less that that one will determine value and worth according to what the Market has determined. Our relative investment and involvement in the Market, determines in great degree, what we each of us determines for ourselves to have worth and value. Someone, who lives on the fringes of the Market, walks the borders and edges of the Market may determine worth and value to be diametrically opposed to what the Market states. For instance, according to the Market "diamonds are a girls best friend". But for upwards of two billion malnourished people in this world diamonds are of less worth than a good meal and some clean water to drink. So, diamonds are the "Best friend" of someone who has had their source of drinking water polluted by a mining operation for those very diamonds. If the Market falls short in any one single area it is by determining the value of that which governs status and hierarchy to have more value than that which governs mere survival. Diamonds might be a girls best friend in Manhattan; probably not for someone in that desert left behind by the wandering capitalists. There are some major holes in the Market. Namely, those regional pockets of valuation, where what is accrued has no meaning in relation to Life and Living, except as it determines the appearance of status and hierarchy. Rule number five: The Market often values the valueless and devalues the valuable. Diamonds and gold come at a price: denigrated landscapes and dirtied waters. Rivers running flush with mercury; the fallout from status seekers and greed-barons whose adornment in the capitalistic center of progress costs the peripheral arm of the Colonial Order basic standards of health and welfare that the adorned subjects would not want to have denied themselves. Progress. Growth. Costs. Someone pays. Sacrifices are offered.
Just a crucifixion an hour;
Or: The Body, in relation to the Market, becomes merely a canvas of little value and worth, upon which commodities and images of greater Market value can be bonded so as to give a Market derived boost to the given Nature. The Body, the given Nature, henceforth, becomes devalued in relationship to the latest populist fetishes which the Body merely becomes a bulletin board for, a posting place, a landing strip for fad and populist iconography. In essence, according to the Market, the Body then has value only in so far as it allows one to labor in trade for commodities, or as a pincushion upon which one can bond and attach populist objects and images, which are, according to the Market, of more value than the actual Body. Example: The Nike logo is worth more in Market value than you as Body. This takes us to rule number six: The Body, as given, is the most devalued and debased of all the Market commodities; it has value only in relation to what it can produce in relation to the Market, or what it can advertise in relation to the Market by wearing Market valued icons and apparel. It is not the least bit ironic that the single greatest substance we all possess/are (the Body) is the one that is also the most debased and devalued in relationship to the Market. And it matters little that the Market uses and consumes bodies of apparent Beauty with which to hawk commodities with. That also is a debasement of the Body. Why? Because the Body has value only in relation to what it can produce and provide for the Market. It matters little if the production appearance is one of beauty or not. The statement is that "the Body has value in so far as it can produce for the Market, or be adorned with the imagistic productions of the Market." In that sense, then, the Market debases the Body, and further displaces and alienates Eros (or Love) from the Body, casting it off to be a devotion for production and adornment, fantasy and imagined worth through icon affiliation. The love that was destined for the Body is lost in the swell of adornment and the tide of increasing production. The Body, in return, burdens us with symptoms designed to get our attention; meanwhile, all we can do is further adorn the symptoms of the already adorned Body. The Body cries in swells of anguish for the values the Market forces it to be adorned with. The consequences of which are rule number seven: The symptoms that the Body expresses with meaningful intent become in relation to the Market just another reason to further adorn the Body. Herein, the symptoms of the Body become, themselves, just another sign pointing to a need for an increase in production and adornment; now adorning the symptoms of the Body-unacknowledged. The symptoms that the Body expresses are not seen as messages of intent, but as failings of that Body (why the failings?). When the Body fails us and the symptoms deprive us of our ability to produce for the Market we can labor no more. The Body has failed us in relation to production. However, we can still adorn the symptoms, and there are other Bodies that can and will labor in production for means destined to repress, diminish and/or alleve the symptoms from the Body; all so the Body can be 'free' to produce for the Market yet again. The symptoms are not seen as indicators of neglect, but as impediments to production. Repression becomes redoubled in many cases. Body. Adorned with objects. Bondage to commodities. Body cries out beneath the shrill of appearances, the weight of icons and labels. Symptoms appear, arise, command attention. The Market produces measures to dumb down the symptoms which are Body of neglect seeking the care of attentiveness. Repression redoubled. Body: first denied in favor of adronment; second denied the ear of listening in relation to its symptoms of manifested oppression. A Market-driven culture, such as the one that we are each invested in to a greater or lesser degree, determines that production and consumption become the two-pronged scale of value for us as subjects. We are what we can produce; which allows us to be noted for what we can afford to consume. So, we define ourselves according to our job in the bowels, or up on the high-rise of the Market Kingdom. We are also defined as subjects according to what we adorn ourselves with. In other words, those objects that we bond with, that we attach ourselves to through desire or affinity become extensions of our identity, adornments of a self that can serve to clue others in on "who we are". Essentially, then, we, as subjects, become defined according to the terms that the culture defines itself; which is currently what we can produce and what we consume. As we play the game we are being defined and judged according to our production, and the level of consumption that the return value on our production allows us. Said another way: Our productions, our labors, are valued, this value is then turned back into the system as exchange through the purchase of commodities; commodities that are themselves the productive labors of others. The Market determines the value of all of our labors, which give rise to our productions, and the labors and productions of others that we purchase as commodities in the Market. All of this exchange is what constitutes the Market. Exchange is what takes place in the Market. We could say that the Market is most essentially constituted of exchangeable flows and breaks in and branches of those exchangeable flows. Flows of goods and flows of labor; flows of energy and flows of fuel to feed the flowing; flows of information and flows of capital; flows of commodities and flows of desire; flows of feeling attention and flows of diversion, displacement, and demand. The Market is fluid and dynamic in that there is a continual flowing of goods and services, capital and value, exchange and information relating to what is of increasing value and what is experiencing a decrease in value. The Market flows and breaks flows. Flow of capital. Holding back: a break in the flow. Saving, investing, producing, consuming flows. Impermanence: fluid; flowing. Gilles Deleuze, along with Felix Guattari, expand upon the nature of flows in a capitalist regime. In their book Anti-Oedipus, the nature of flows, and the breaks in those flows --- that both power and disturb the capitalist system and state --- are brought to light in reference to psychoanalysis. We have all seen how the power of flows becomes the power of the Market; where the emergence of new conditions are appropriated by the Market quickly so as to capitalize as soon as possible. Here we see how the Market appropriates what is "emergent" as fast it can, so as to not allow that "emergent" to disturb or disrupt the system. This is much like the blossoming individual who emerges new capacities, and must immediately appropriate those emergent capacities into the self-system or risk a dissociative disorder that would serve to divide the emergent capacity from the pre-emergent structure that served as the foundation and ground for that emergent capacity. Or, stated more simply: the emergent Market forces are incorporated into the structures of the Market that allowed for those emergent Market forces to come into being in the first place. The Market does not allow for any long-term division of emergent capacity and pre-emergent structures. To do so would be to spell a terminable death for the emergent capacity and potentially so for the Market structures as well. The Market as a force does not want to see any adjacent power structure emerge, which is why it incorporates all other emergents within its field and then codes these emergents according to the directives of the Market itself. The Market forces everything into the system. The emergents are capitalized on as quickly as possible. Meaning, all emergents are co-opted as quickly as possible, rendered benign and obedient, subsumed by the Market. Colonization is a hard habit to break. Patterns recur.
We could say that the Market evolves in a way so as to consume the rebellions and transformations that its structures give birth to. The repressive tendencies of the Market structures --- those that seed a new rebellion --- become the very structures and Market-tendencies that colonize the rebellion and render it as commodify, a new populist image or icon to be flowed and capitalized on in the Market. For instance, a new narrative or story of rebellion and revolution is attributed with a value and given a place on the shelf at your local shop, or occupies a space on your computer monitor, or is a made-for-TV movie. The revolution commodified; which renders it impotent. Yes, the rebels are whores too. And the new ideological princes are just as Market-driven as the old guard could ever be accused of being. It appears that Andy Warhol was more of a prophet than an artist: The neo-rebellions in our time end up in compromising positions; bent over, assuming the capitalistic stance, doing the Market-dance, donning an image, plastered with icons, tattooed with fads and market fetishes --- everyone's a whore for the Market. Smile. Pose. Pawn. Preen. The fifteen-minute clock of Market-fame is ticking.
|