The Prison

Here's another text from 7 years ago...

We see ourselves as a trap. The ego, identity, individuality, and the self as cages. Subjectivity, produced in and by culture, is seen as restricting, repressing, alienating: the oppression of the State, or of a distributed network of ideological state apparatuses. Our whole culture, viewed critically, appears as a prison from which escape would be desirable but remains impossible to achieve.

What has prompted this radical self-doubt – this desire to think critically, which means: to be self-critical to the point of masochistic disgust? A failure of confidence, a sense of despair and of weakness. The whole critical enterprise smacks of bad conscience. A guilty self-flagellation, an ascetic self-scourging worthy not just of Christian saints but of Jesus himself, nailed to the cross, bleeding. Much of what is called Postmodernism is a lament on the sins of the fathers who we can neither forgive nor escape becoming in turn. Here are its discursive foundations (or articles of faith):

"Western culture is perverse and dangerous, a plague which has swept virulently across the past 500 years leaving nothing but sickness. But there are no options, no alternatives, no good works that we can perform as a penance, no remission of these sins. And, worst of all, we enjoy what this bloody history has brought us. We enjoy ourselves, we can’t help enjoying ourselves, we revel in the tainted trap of our culture.

"Western culture believes it has found paradise here and now, and even if the price was plunder exploitation and indifference, no one wants to give anything back."

Paradoxically, this gloomy secular despair is more Christian than Christianity itself. The death of God has brought the death of man, man as the measure of all things, man as evolutionary triumph. Now that there is no one else to blame, we blame ourselves.

"The horror! The horror of that nothingness inside and outside, of the guilty little secret inside us all – a dirty, sexual, violent, irrational desire that destroys, selfish, greedy, amoral..."

Blaming the self, that controlling cultural imposition, the worst sort of Romanticism prevails under the sign of alienation.

"All this hurt, this pain and suffering is the result of our alienation from our true, natural selves. Culture is a pestilence, imprisoning and alienating us all, and oh how fervently we pray for salvation!"

But this nostalgia for our true, free selves, unburdened of civilization and its evils, is nothing but displaced nostalgia for God, for the redemption God might bring. And even the hardiest cynicism, which tells us we are brutal and selfish animals and all else is self-aggrandizement and pretension, still, in the end, amounts to a self-defense against the absence of God, the impossibility of salvation. It still accepts the same ground, trades in the same currency, circulates the same canker.

Turning our critical eyes to the past and present we question everything, exposing the expedient, rotten roots of our thoughts, histories, and words; but we never really ask why this should have become necessary. Of course, the assumption is that such a self-examination will facilitate change, enlightened progress. Marx’s famous words underwrite the whole project—"Philosophers so far have only talked about the world; the point however is to change it". But critical theory’s quantitative impact on events is negligible, to say the least. Concepts most people don’t understand are circulated in a decidedly closed economy comprised almost solely of western academics. If anything, such a commerce continues—intellectually—the very imperialistic colonization it claims to challenge, while simultaneously forming a lengthy, ponderous judgement on ourselves which, consequently, appears first and foremost as a confession. Critical theory is a kind of confession of guilt, given in the hope of salvation in the future in the form of enlightened progress.

"If we can only analyze what we have done, why and how we have performed these terrible deeds, then perhaps the burden will be lifted?"

But the more we look, the more we see the scale of the horror, the more everything is dragged down lower and lower into the circle of hell, until—as today—even our very sense of identity is suspect.

"Our troubles began with civilization itself, with the first settlers, agriculture, writing; at the moment a social reality principle defeated the desire for instant gratification, and we deferred pleasure, we were already cast out of Eden, and the sin is inseparable from our self-consciousness itself."

And there is no possibility of going back, no return to paradise, but only the hope of future atonement.

"Perhaps if we stop here, so very weary now after all these millennia, and recount all our errors, we can somehow bring that day of atonement closer? If we renounce everything human, everything we have produced, thought, desired or believed, showing its falsity and arrogance, perhaps then we will be forgiven?"

A sorry tale, which mistakes itself entirely because it still believes that man is the measure of all things, that our deeds are so terrible—and, therefore, so important—that we must castigate ourselves in an interminable self-analysis. As Nietzsche might have said – can someone open a window and let some fresh air into this unhealthy, sickly prison-cell we have built for ourselves out of a seemingly infinite guilt? But we no longer believe there is fresh air outside, or even that there is an outside. Kant’s lack of faith in any possibility of reaching an outside of subjectivity remains. The limits of reason have become the limits of the world itself, in a monstrous human, all to human anthropomorphism. Lacking faith in ourselves and in the world, we have willingly, guiltily, chained ourselves up, carefully, as scholars, bolting every door and boarding up every window.

"How do we escape from this prison?"