Friday, August 05, 2005
(9:07 PM) | Anonymous:
On the Aversion to Apocalyptic Experience.
Ever since my introductory course to phenomenology two years ago I've been interested in experience as a philosophical concept. This interest was sharpened when I first read Goodchild and Deleuze & Guattari over a year ago in Paris. For Goodchild experience is one way of re-directing our attention to that which matters, like actually talking to the poor instead of merely making assertions like this one that talking to the poor is a good thing. So what about the experience of terror that lies behind everyday life in a germinal state? I'm thinking about those moments when you're in the elevator and something seems to go wrong, or when the skyscraper you work in starts to shake and there's some unexplained crescendo of sound. Those moments when you fear that those fears that have always stayed safely in the realm of possibility appear to become actual.Tomorrow is the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima. The event that has cast a certain kind of paranoia and a certain sense of evil that is, in many ways, more perverse than the Holocaust. At least after the Holocaust we had a general agreement to repeat the mantra "Never again", but after Hiroshima we had Nagasaki and a general feeling that the possession of nuclear arms was important to the safety of the United States (and France, and Russia, and Britain, and Israel, and India, and Pakistan, and North Korea, and China...). Derrida wrote in "No Apocalypse, Not Now" that ever moment we live it is with this Apocalyptic moment deferred. Another moment when we had not yet destroyed the world. He wrote this before the end of the Cold War, but I think we still live under the shadow of this experience.
This is one of the ways I explain the proliferation of iPods, cell phones, and other forms of creating a private world in public spaces. Any device that effectively cuts us off from the world around us helps us to avoid the terror that ultimately we won't be able to stop if those with the means decide to bring about that end. So we decide to divert our attention away from that experience. We even defer the thought of its deferral.
Religion? No, that isn't the opiate of the people. Routines regulated by PDF's and a being-in-the-world facilitated by headphones seem to be helping us get by much better these days.
