Goran Gocić Belgrade
One Genealogy of De-centring Spatial Center and De-centring: Architecture Links between architecture and centering are indeed very old: they date all the way back to the first human shelters. The base of an early ‘house’ was round. That was the case with settlings found in Olduvai, Tanzania which date 1.9 million years ago. Cornered shapes were introduced relatively recently to divide settlings into rooms and as defensive measures (for example in Catal Huyuk, Turkey, 8.5 thousand years ago)1. Roland Barthes summarized a more recent tendency in contrasting American, European and Asian urbanism. He drew attention to a typically American syndrome of a city as a geometrical network of roads without a center, unknown in Europe whose cities are pointedly centered: Quadrangular, reticulated cities (Los Angeles, for instance) are said to produce a profound uneasiness: they offend our synesthetic sentiment of the City, which requires that any urban space have a center to go to, to return from. […] For many reasons (historical, economic, religious, military), the West understood this law only too well: all its cities are concentric; but also, in accord with the very movement of Western metaphysics, for which every center is the site of truth, the center of our cities is always full: a marked site, it is here that the values of civilization are gathered and condensed: spirituality (churches), power (offices), money (banks), merchandise (department stores), language (agoras: cafes and promenades) goods, word. […] Tokyo offers this precious paradox: it does possess a center, but this center is empty. (Roland Barthes)2 In the quoted passage there are three parallel relations toward the center in urbanism. The first solution is ‘hierarchical’, the second is ‘transitive’, and the third is ‘egalitarian’. In a way, Europe’s urbanism is hierarchically centralized: the center even visually rules the periphery. In Tokyo, the center is apparently emptied, but it is still concentric (in the center is the emperor’s residence, where a garden is located, inaccessible to visitors and looks). Finally, the center of Los Angeles is 1 2
Morris 1994. One can argue that irregularly-shaped dwellings of the 20th century’s architecture present a next step of decentring in spatial terms. Barthes 1970, 30.
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everywhere: it does not exist even as a memory. A point from which the settlers started to build the city seems irrelevant. Los Angeles establishes an egalitarian grid, similar to that of www.
Spiritual Centring: Religion In the time of the mentioned settlements in Turkey, man recognized himself as a master of the land he chose to inhabit, shifting from a nomadic life and ‘passive’ diet based on gathering plants and hunting animals to the standing, urban life and ‘active’ diet based on cultivating plants and breeding animals – what we call the ‘Palaeolithic revolution’. It is interesting that precisely at that time (as a consequence?) the first traces of a hierarchy in the sky appeared. The gods were tied to natural forces, critical for survival. A period of crucial spiritual centralization, which occurred between 800 and 200 B.C, in the Middle East, India and China, was marked by a German philosopher Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age.3 What tied together figures such as Socrates in Greece, Zoroaster in Persia, Isaiah in Judah, Buddha in India and Confucius in China (who did not know about each other) was an unprecedented ambition to centralize and codify man’s spiritual domain. That was the cardinal point. In abandoning a complex Parthenon of competing gods in favor of the one almighty God, the rising monotheistic religions from the Middle East – Zoroasterism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – were being born. Their center of belief and morality is One Prime Being, and in the center of perfecting oneself is a possibility of getting closer to Him and following His will. Common to these religious movements is the fact that ‘centering’ in the spiritual domain went hand in hand with a gradual centering in space, economy and politics. Far East religions – Buddhism and Taoism in the first place – have preserved ethic ideals and spiritual practices, but with one difference: their center is empty. Buddha offered a radical solution for the overcrowded Indian Parthenon (whose cosmopolitan strategy of assimilation resulted in about 9 billion deities): he simply nullified it. Buddha talks about spiritual perfecting, but never mentions the prime being. The place filled with a monotheistic God in Buddhism is emptiness, nothingness, nirvana. Perhaps that is the reason of for the popularity Buddhism in the increasingly decentred West: some claim that Buddhism is suitable as the only available ‘atheistic religion’. Pagans and the Western materialist fraction alike exclude spiritual
3
Jaspers 1949.
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centralization or a notion of the center. God does not exist; moreover, for him there is neither a conceivable place nor a memory. The center is not anywhere, that is, it is everywhere.4 In the time of globalizing, a gesture of faith is sought in a trans-religious interaction between two or more religions, such as conversion. God is not dead anymore: today he is temporary, and, similarly to postmodern wars, he is of ‘limited range and means’ occasionally resurrecting at borderlines between big religions.5 The newly coined fluctuating identity is irreconcilable with the fixed religious logic of monotheism. The Bahá’í faith, dating from 19th century, seems like one of the most complete (that is to say: the most emptied) trans-religious movements of today. Another symptomatic case is that of even the younger Scientology. It is not surprizing that such New Age churches note such a large influx of adherents and provoke large numbers of conversions. (1) Architecture correlated with Religion (1.1) fixed center
(1.2) hidden center
(1.3) erased center
round-shaped dwellings
square-shaped dwellings
irregular-shapeddwellings
European capitals
Tokyo
Los Angeles
Judaism, Christianity, Islam
Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism
Bahá’í, Scientology
National Concept or the Fixed Center The described concepts have contemporary analogies. What we recognize today as ‘national culture’ for example – an invention of 18th and 19th centuries – is an entity anchored in an essentialist center which is rarely questioned, duly sworn to and respected. Under a principle of concentric circles, that center, which insists sometimes on an arguable continuity (which is usually called ‘national tradition’), is a criterion for evaluating everything else, including all other cultures. The center (tradition) is a referential point. This means that a national concept of culture is relatively closed, created with a specific ‘audience’ in mind. It returns to a criterion of perpetual contact with (and sometimes a strenuous journey toward) its center, at a price that it does not accept and is not accepted, that it does not understand and it is not understood, that it isolates and is isolated, even
4 5
Postmodern teachings conform to such claims. Such as the alternation of atrocity and pilgrimage sites in Ayodya (India) and Međugorje (Croatia).
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at the price it destroys and is destroyed. It, so to speak, understands the outside world only if it translates it into its own terms, frames it within its own picture. Germany, for example, has been ‘centered’ several times in its history. Centering is a part of its historical destiny (first by Luther’s Reformation, second by Bismarck’s unifications, third by Nazism, and fourth by the unification of Western and Eastern Germany). This process has been noted both by Germans of high and low register, from the schizophrenic judge Daniel Schreber6 to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and from the ‘great German no’ (Protestantism) to the ‘great German yes’ (Nazism). It is no coincidence that German thinkers, such as Karl Jaspers in the history of religion and Hans Sedlmayr in history of art,7 pioneered the concept of centering. The analogy of this concept in European economy is regulated and tariffprotected national industries in rivalry concerning technology, transport and energy – for example, the rivalry which existed between Britain and Germany at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. Economic determinists would argue that our strong patriotic sentiments are but a simple consequence of certain principles of production and exchange.
The Cosmopolitan Concept or the Hidden Center The cosmopolitan concept of culture is different from a national one, above all regarding its flexibility. To order to survive, it has to not only adjust other codes to its own, but also to transform, to perfect, and to build upon itself. In other words, to seduce and conquer, it does not have to turn Other into itself, but to assimilate her or him, if necessary, together with her or his principles. A culture, which developed within these boundaries, has an ability and skill to address both a domestic and foreign audience. A political model for this concept is the British Empire, and it includes European colonial variants. The logic in economy which stands behind it is Imperialism, the second phase of Capitalism. A culture developed in this way has its roots in one ethos, one nation, and one tradition. However, in order to be adaptable and capable of unexpected mutations and sudden fusions (analogous to sudden political pacts), its center has to be at least partially ‘hidden’. That is to say, it should be ready for modifications, trained
6 7
Schreber 1903 In works such as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, 1948) New Jersey 2006: Transaction Publishers.
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for precisely controlled changes and an unlimited assimilation with the aid of an extremely flexible ideology. That way, it can easily modify its periphery.
The Trans-national Concept or the Erased Center Both of the above mentioned concepts are defined by their center. However, the trans-national concept, operative since the mid-1970s, by abandoning a valueoriented center altogether, takes over a strategy of pilling up. It can take over a new code or the Other’s codes, without necessarily negating/translating them (national culture) or assimilating them (cosmopolitan culture). It draws its strength and universality from that the fact that it does not have a clear origin or denies one, especially in the time of mass culture and the globalization of markets. The essence of a trans-national shift in culture (which would turn out to be a strategy and criteria of American neo-colonial supremacy) is the gradual empting of national or any other fixed identities, as well as ‘centerness’ and, in the final equation, turning everything (including ideology) into a consumer product. In economy, parallel to this concept is the third phase of ‘financial’ capitalism, that is, non-national globalizing in which decentred capital and product-makers (organized in so-called trans-national companies) are acquiring mobility and sovereignty which overtakes that of nation states. Capital, production and marketing are decentred, void of national, legislative, ethical and other ‘prejudices’ and easily change hands. A similar process in culture officially goes under the name postmodernism. Postmodernism is, first in architecture, and then in literature and fine arts, developed also as a decentred, eclectic, to a degree nostalgic and arguably superficial (that is, primarily decorative) style; a style with a lot of adornments and quotations and few prejudices and principles.
Identity in New Conditions: Self and De-centering A Chilean philosopher and later a Buddhist, Francesco Varela, in a book about a sense of identity8, discussed three categories of self: (1) Desperate clinging of human mind toward a central self, as some sort of hard and immutable foundation of existence. (2) Uppercase Self (‘ego-self ’) as hidden and unchanging essence of one’s identity.
8
Varela, et al. 1993.
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(3) Series of mental and bodily events and formations that have a degree of casual coherence and integrity through time.9 Again, one could see an analogy with the previously given concepts. When (1) is considered, it seems that among the contemporary psychologists there is a consensus that Self in this respect is simply non-existent, an illusory entity. Postmodernists agree: man is an incomplete being, and hard foundations or ‘big narratives’ are to be added (and deducted) at will. When one considers (2), a metaphor with onion springs to one’ s mind. Looking for a center of identity, we envision it as a stone-fruit, where an aim is finding its center, its essence, a place where all other layers of identity spring and are derived from. However, postmodern theory offers a model of identity as onions, where peeling one layer leads to another level until the process eventually reveals an empty center: in this case, there are only layers, not an essence. What is left is a loose concept of self (3), which is also the target of various, above all economy-motivated decentring pressures. In order that economy secures incessant growth, and the market pumps ever more products, it resorts to dissolving all fixed values and habits. Thus, the most suitable consumer is the bearer of the third type of self, a man with many skills, but without a vocation, a man with strong desires, but without principles. How does the stated political logic affect one’s identity? Generally speaking, a ‘nationalist’ puts preserving his identity in front of understanding the Other; he sacrifices the experience of community/communication/exchange with the Other in favor of some inherited, undisputed, even somewhat incestuous sovereignty. The cosmopolitan, on the other hand, perhaps consciously undermines part of his origin in favor of an experience of partial (and biased) community/communication/exchange with the Other.10 A ‘trans-nationalist’, however, suffers from a kind of cultivated anomie – wilfully ‘abandons’ the significance of his origin as well as knowledge about the multiple roots he is supposed (or not supposed) to identify with. Identification, in short, becomes a superfluous luxury, and its temporariness is a relevant attribute11. A community is sought and founded on another type of division, in a neo-tribal or consumer identity. Since he treats his origin as an abandoned child, the trans-nationalist sacrifices all his collective memories to temporary exchange.
9 Varela, et al. 1993, 41. 10 In the political and economic sense, a true cosmopolitan looks at the Other no less as his rival or his workforce – slave or merchandise – but his rhetoric is, it seems, superior. 11 Judging from a ‘fixed’ point of view, a painful one.
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But in comparison, his communication and exchange are speedy and without reserve, or, to be more precise, they aim for certain completeness. Therefore, they cease to fall under ‘communication’ and ‘exchange’ anymore; instead, they show a tendency to become net-building and blending. A trans-nationalist does not, therefore, identify with one, but with many, and that is why his identification (and therefore his communities) is always temporary. The price of this freedom of communication/net-building and exchange/blending is a certain emptiness; only an absence of one’s own code relegates such fast movement through other codes. Trans-nationalism is in a way a schizophrenic tendency: it supposes penetrating into other codes as if there is no identity, to the point where acquired ‘otherness’ easily overtakes and transcends even the Other herself or himself. This is possible because of the consciousness about the temporariness. Trans-nationalism, in this respect, is emptied cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitanism with an intentionally ‘discarded’ center. That is how we arrive at the following diagram: (2) Identity correlated with Economy (2.1) fixed center
(2.2) hidden center
(3.3) erased center
‘well founded’ Self
hidden Self (‘ego’)
Self seen in time/space continuity
national hierarchy
cosmopolitan hierarchy
trans-national hierarchy
Germany
British Empire
USA
I phase of capitalism
II phase of capitalism
III phase of capitalism
Centered Cinema: Wayne’s Star-Image If we swiftly switch to popular culture, the analogies are easily spotted. A good example of the ‘national’ rivalry was a bitter fight over the European cinema audience at the beginning of the 20th century, between France, Germany and USA. Today we know the outcome of that rivalry. The star-image in cinema also abides to analogous laws. With ‘classic’ film stars (those from the period of profiled national industries, 1928–1974), a permanent servicing (and occasional build-up) of star-image with every film was more important than the so-called ‘quality’ of the respective roles. In fact, the ‘quality’ itself was measured by establishing and a continuity of the fixed star-image, the quality of permanence, so to speak. Lawrence Olivier’s heroes in perpetual Hamlet-like thoughtfulness, John Wayne’s vital settlers of the Wild West, Greta Garbo’s capricious beauties, Humphrey Bogart’s hoodlums with golden hearts – all belong to this group.
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You can see him standing there at the end of the long stretch of a bar. He’s wearing that pinkish bib shirt, that leather vest, that dirty pale-tan hat. He’s got beef everywhere on his body, but not fat. The gun, worn high on his hip in the working cowman’s practicality, not low as the gunslinger’s style, is the Colt Single Action Army .38–40 with its yellowing ivory grips. The eyes are weary, rich in wisdom, impatient with pilgrims, tenderfeet, and blanketheads, possibly incapable of expressing love because they are so fixed on duty. He is what for decades was a vision of the ideal man. (Stephen Hunter on John Wayne)12 John Wayne, untarnished symbol of American patriotism, whose career spreads throughout the national period of film history, starred in one interesting propaganda movie, Green Berets (1968). The film was made in the middle of the Vietnam War (the same year as the Tet offensive). It was actually the very first film of some 500 features about the American intervention in Vietnam. Wayne, who at the time supported the right-wing John Birch Society, also co-directed this film, the most explicit US propaganda regarding the subject. It turned out that the directorial debut of generically and politically committed (‘centered’) Wayne had several similarities with a western film. The US military camp is called Dodge City and the Vietnamese talk like Apaches. Dangerous zones are called ‘Indian land’, and Vietnamese scouts are known under the name ‘Keith Carson’.13 At the end, the hero addresses a Vietnamese orphan: ‘All this is because of you’, and they walk into the sunset together… just like it happens in Wayne’s westerns. Here, Wayne is not hindered, but assisted by his fixed star-image. On the other hand, Wayne’s typecast ability was never more painfully conspicuous then in a movie Conqueror where he – together with his cowboy accent and gestures – stars as Genghis-Khan. That work is habitually quoted in the ‘all time worst’ film lists. The point is that these kinds of actors always preserve a ‘fixed center’. All played heroes that are some sort of extension of the previous ones.
The Hidden Center in Cinema: Day-Lewis’s Star-Image It turned out, however, that the type of actor whose ‘personality’, that is, fixed, immutable star-image always transcends heroes he is playing – became simply archaic in the age of the simulation of identity. John Wayne started his career as an extra and never studied cinema or theatre. A model of intellectual, ‘method’ technique of acting, championed by Lee Strasberg, found itself at the opposite pole. In the US, the most perfect product of this concept was Marlon Brando. 12 Hunter 2005, 6. 13 As noted by J. Hoberman and others.
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Among the most competent exponents of the ‘method’ technique in the trade today is a British actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The stress is on effective and convincing trans-formation. The impression is that Day-Lewis can be everything, from Czech in Unbearable Lightness of Being to Irish in In the Name of the Father, from high-mimetic Red Indian hero Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans to paralyzed writer in My Left Foot, not only readily, but always with similar, intense plausibility. True, Brando, partly by intentional eccentricity, partly by tragic twists of fate, drew attention to his identity. Day-Lewis is much more discreet in that respect. Authentic ‘Day-Lewis’ can exist somewhere, but his real identity is invisible, inconspicuous, or, at any rate, hidden from the public. These kinds of careers illustrate the point of apparent ‘losing the subject’. ‘Travelers without a country’, actors of this kind enter the heroes they interpret ‘directly’ (although temporarily and ‘forgetfully’) without any reserve or ‘personality residues’, as if they always start from zero. Their star-image is based on absence of any star-image. Transformations of Day-Lewis are possible because of the ‘hyperreal’ acting technique. That technique now effectively hides any central identity which was so important for Olivier, Wayne or Bogart. In other words, a star-image can be fixed and immutable, but the center can be hidden nevertheless – British actors by and large fall under the ‘cosmopolitan’ scheme. It is impossible, for example, looking at them on screen, to identify the working-class origin of Michael Kane or the rural Welsh roots of Richard Burton. As Richard Roud notices: “Not surprisingly, [Douglas] Fairbanks, the archetypal W.A.S.P., was born Julius Ulman (cf. that archetypal Englishman Leslie Howard, who was the son of Hungarian immigrants)”.14
The De-centered, Trans-national Figures: A Fluctuating Star-Image A whole new chapter of contemporary cinema is expressed with decentred and trаns-nаtiоnаl figures. For example, instead of lending bits of her (national, political) identity to roles she plays, a Chinese actress Joann Chen appears to temporarily empty out her identity both for these roles and by them. Here, technique is not decisive; it is as if Chen does not have to work hard in order to hide a center playing different nationalities – American in Shadow of a Stranger, Chinese in The 14 Roud 1980, 335. The mentioned actors simply invented themselves: their (not only class) identity is emptied out by their speech. But once established, their star-image was not revised later.
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Last Emperor, Vietnamese in Heaven and Earth, Eskimo in On Deadly Ground.15 That center is already cleared and Chen, even without precisely designed transformations, is equally plausible in each of these national stereotypes – precisely because she is not burdened by that kind of ‘memory’ so important for Wayne. Consequently, she can play with equal zeal in a pro-Communist propaganda feature such as Youth and in pro-capitalist propaganda such as The Awakening, something ‘centered’ actors could not be imagined doing. It is similar with Jason Scott Lee, an actor with nationally unpronounced looks (Hawaiian-Chinese origin), who also could ‘switch’ his ethnicity on screen easily when needed, without a substantial transformation (Hindi in Jungle Book, native from Easter Islands in Rapa Nui, Chinese in Dragon: The Story of Bruce Lee and so on). The star-image is so de-centralized that it is impossible to determine its starting-point, but only its final destination; the latter becomes the only relevant point. It is similar with two generations of British comedians. One could say that the humor of Benny Hill was ‘centered’ to a large extent. Hill’s alter ego had almost always been the same chubby, dirty old man, whose acts were done under the influence of slapstick and early cinema, heavily seasoned with physical humor and sexual allusions with minimal variations – as if Hill’s role model was Fatty Arbuckle. On the other hand, the alter ego of the contemporary comedian Sasha Baron is split to a series of unrelated (although all politically incorrect) personalities, ‘black’ rapper Ali G, TV reporter from Kazakhstan Borat, gay journalist Bruno from Austria and so on. At the same time, Baron’s central identity is inaccessible to the public. At the price that this is understood as some kind of economic determinism, there is an astounding analogy between a fixed star-image in Hollywood and the fixed price of a dollar with the golden reserve, according to an agreement from Breton Woods (1944). Accordingly, fluctuating a film image followed just as closely a decentred fluctuating dollar (established by Nixon administration in 1971). Not at all surprisingly, the American deregulating of markets and an inclination to financial capitalism dates from the same period.
The Ideology of a ‘Traitor’: Popular Converts I think that adventure becomes ever-rarer in the contemporary world. The only adventure one can indulge in is a professional one. (Herman Huppen)16 15 See Film Review (London), August, 1994 16 Groensteen 1982, 3–4
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This statement by a comic strip author is symptomatic. He negated geographic adventure in favor of a vocational one. What is valid for both are similar laws of impossible juncture, conversion, and betrayal of a code. These facts are returning us to the notion of transgression, to trans-shift in the described sense. A good example is the reputable German journalist Günter Wallraff, who often uses a disguise to research the life of oppressed minorities, such as tramps, manual workers, or blacks. For example, he used such a method to experience the exploitation of economic migrants in Germany (as in the major book and documentary Ganz Unten17). Wallraff is one of the key examples of a trans-existential program, a ground-breaking offence, a radical transgression and an engaged adventure: he spent a few years working as Ali, a Turkish Gastarbeiter, in a skin of ‘the insulted and the injured’ counterculture, pedantically noting the thick racism of his compatriots. This kind of transgression is not only possible, but also desirable. Contemporary converts of pop culture are among the most authentic inventions of the New Age. They are some kind of schizophrenic revolutionaries. Besides, not only the results of class origin, upbringing or national allegiances are altered and negated. But also resation applies to every other sphere of identity, such as religious denominations (conversion to Buddhism of a late American poet Allen Ginsberg, or to Islam of a pop singer Cat Stevens). But a few people would turn to more radical and bizarre transformations of previously immutable things, such as racial attributes (the notorious case of the ‘whitening’ of singer Michael Jackson), or even attributes of a species (or in the case of native American Dennis Avner who went through a series of surgeries in order to resemble a tiger). Just like only a polyglot reaches a point of ‘understanding language’, a transfaithful becomes ‘spiritual’ only after conversion, in a symbolic betrayal of one (given) code in favor of another (chosen) code. Offence, in a way, sanctions a lower value of that which is deserted for the sake of something else. At the same time, something considered the most ‘elementary’ consistency (Ginsberg as Jewish, Stevens as Greek, Jackson as black) is read as pure shallow-mindedness, outdated, and undesirable ‘stick-to-it-ness’. The trans-modern self cannot trans-scend without some radical form of transgression, as if, without it, it would stay in some kind of unbearable confinement, in the prison of identity. On the top of it, a new identity is trans-parent like a bricolage; it includes previous meanings, but stays in negation. In other words, it can only be the ‘ideology of a traitor’. The same way that eclecticism is used in postmodern art, it is possible to form a negating ‘assemblage’ in building sex,
17 Wallraff 1985
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religion, race, looks, vocation, destiny. Not only ‘creating’ in this respect proves to be more relevant than life, but also newly found identities readily invert the order of nature itself. One should let go. Since the notions of every ‘traditionalism’ are de-substantialized or are being de-substantialized – a return to their nominal meaning seems unbearably literal, and in the final count ‘fundamentalist’. The consequence of cyclic changes in consumer habits and technologies is that every (and not only national and religious) type of ‘inherited’ or ‘apparent’ conditionality (marital, national, racial, vocational, sexual) is read as ‘fundamentalist’. It has to be a subject to the incessant and global dynamic of change; it becomes animated only in some schism, only in schizophrenic negation, necessary for the functioning of a dynamic and rapidly changing market. (3) Celebrities Correlated with Image/Identity (3.1) fixed center
(3.2) hidden center
(3.3) erased center
(temporarily hidden)
(temporarily erased)
Day-Lewis
Chen
Wayne
Baron
Lee
Bogart
Wallraff
Olivier
Garbo Hill (permanently hidden)
(permanently erased – spiritual)
Kane
Ginsberg
Burton
Stevens (permanently erased – physical) Jackson Avner
The Further De-Centering and the Darwinian Dilemma All that said, we reach the key issue regarding Charles Darwin’s work today (together with the line of thinkers he is associated with, Thomas Malthus, Ernst Haeckel et al). This issue is whether life is perceived as sacred or not, whether the human has some central purpose. If life, including human life, is still experienced as a result of a centered singularity, of a unique divine intervention (as advocated
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by the most living religions), then the proposition has certain ontological, legal and other consequences. If life, on the other hand, is a result of the complex mechanics of survival and interaction with an environment (as accepted by the secular West), then social Darwinists might have a point when they see no ethical obstacles in claiming extensions of that interaction with other means, from eugenics to genetic engineering.18 One feels that this complex issue is somehow beyond the reach of the purely Creationists vs. Darwinists dispute, or left to the whims of a purely political domain (regulated on a ‘human rights’ level). The consequences are too overreaching. In this respect, there are two separate paths open for the future. (1) Occasionally, there are incomplete and ill-defined but nevertheless ambitious attempts to somehow snap out of the described de-centering circus viciosus and reclaim the lost center, at least in some respects. In the 1960s, Eliade recognized the hippie counterculture as an heroic attempt to restore some of the values that the ancients cultivated, such as close-knit tribal cooperation and a return to nature. Similar self-conscious, ‘retro’ lifestyles and a return to the ‘fundamentals’ of religion are among the other possible contemporary examples.19 A similar path is advocated by one small fraction of the contemporary anarchists. John Zerzan, for example, proposes a regression all the way to pre-symbolic and de-centralized culture to find happiness and salvation from contemporary alienation, greed, cutthroat rivalry, and the destruction produced by the present system of exchange.20 The environmental consciousness gets an ever-broader consensus around the globe, from Greenpeace and Green Party to the political initiative to reduce industrial pollution. In a radical, although unlikely scenario of such regression, the Western man rejoins his ranks with the natural world21, consciously denying, even abandoning, the project of his mind-boggling and unhindered technological progress.
18 True, crude and openly cruel forms of eugenics (sterilising or killing the handicapped, eradicating ‘unworthy’ ethnicities and so on), became unpopular after the fall of the Nazi adventure, but the core argument, as well as its various manifestations, remain alive and kicking. 19 But such attempts get media attention solely when they get destructive. The likes of Jim Jones and Charles Manson seem to be boogie men whose notoriety is supposed to scare people out of such attempts. 20 Zerzan 2008 21 Following the rules of nature and respect for the environment.
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(2) Another fraction is also raising the stakes, but in the opposite direction – to the next gradient of the de-centering of identity. Apparently, the Western man does his best to apply his superior technological progress to intervene on his own abilities (even his own evolution) and takes steps to embrace new technologies – genetic engineering, synthetic drugs, computerized prostheses, and space travel. He applies the advancements of his technology directly to his mind and body, often – like Scientologists – with religious zeal22. However, the trans-humanist notion to tie up the ideas of decentred identity, technological progress and the Darwinian idea of evolution is ludicrous. The interest behind such radical notions is, in a soft version, survival and, in a hard version, immortality.23 The Western trans-modern confrontation with man’s limits has a taste of both touching and reckless utopia.
References Barthes, R. (1983): Empire of Signs. Hill and Wang, New York. Eliade, M. (1987): The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, New York. Groensteen, Th. (1982): Huppen’s Long March. Interview with Hermann Huppen. In: Groensteen, Th. & Jean-Pierre Dionnet (eds.), Hermann. Alain Littaye, Paris. Hunter, S. (2005): Now Playing at the Valencia. Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies. Simon & Schuster, New York. Jaspers, K. (1953): The Origin and the Goal of History. Routledge and Keegan Paul, London. Morris, D. (1994): The Human Animal. BBC Books, London. Schreber, D. (2000): Memoirs of my nervous Illness. New York Review of Books, New York.
22 Like it is advocated by the Scientology Church, which harbours many of its followers in Hollywood. 23 Many pessimistic futurologists feel that the path taken at the moment by humanity is leading toward a disaster imminent within 40 years, when the world population and environmental neglect will spiral out of control.
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