On Leaving

Toronto’s Pearson Airport is an ideal place from which to leave on a journey. Terminal 1 is shaped like a wing, and if you are flying international, you can enjoy Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres. At the moment I’m sitting inside Tilted Spheres, enjoying my time before boarding a flight to England. The work is about air travel – the curved flanks of metal suggest the tubular frame of a jet, or its wing. It is wonderful, and at the same time terrifying.

This journey is the longest I have ever embarked on – I will be gone more than 2 months. Most of that time will be spent in the historic region of Palestine in a city which is claimed as capital by Israel and the State of Palestine (neither claim is internationally recognized). But before I arrive in that contested region I will spend time in the Republic of Ireland, the province of Northern Ireland, and France. I will attend a week long summer school, visit friends, and perform at a wedding. There is a lot to anticipate, to prepare for, and to write about.

I think the beginning of a trip is a good time to reflect on the goal and purpose of writing about such a trip. On the one hand, it is to convey to friends and family what I’m up to. It’s also a kind of journaling – an exercise in self-clarification where one is forced by the act of writing to impose narrative structures on felt experience. One worry I do have, however, is my tendency to put too much effort into public writing, such as this blog, and less into academic and private writing. Different forms of writing, for different audiences, play a different role in experience. I can write things in a private journal that I would not write here, for instance. And if I write up philosophical ideas here, they do not seem to develop into formal academic work (although, this may be simply a problem of follow-up on my part). So, while I will still try to provide frequent updates, if are not be as long or extensive as on previous trips it is because I’m concentrating on other forms of writing alongside blogging.

Also, this is not simply a writing trip – it is a photography trip as well. And perhaps more so than any trip I have been on before. On this trip I will try to move beyond “taking nice pictures”, to using photographs to convey meaning. In that vein, I will be changing the colours and header photo relatively often to reflect where I am, and what has been happening.

Hegel’s Dialectic of Morality – Part 1 “Conscience to Beautiful Soul”

Note: This is “Conscience to Beautiful Soul”, part 1 of a multi-part series. The Second part will arrive shortly, and be called “Beautiful Soul to God Manifest in the midst”. The Third part will come some time later, and it will contain an attempt to answer, or at least ask the right questions, about what relevance this section of Hegel might have today.

The emergence of the Beautiful Soul. Acting and judging consciousness. The breaking of the hard heart. God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves. Are these utterances mere Hegelian ramblings, or moments in the deepest thinking through of moral activity and reactivity yet accomplished by the western mind? Or some third thing – perhaps a great leap forward in moral thinking, for the most part still not comprehended but even so superseded by the transformation of history, the death of God, and the spectre of apocalypse? If we take Hegel’s chapter on “Conscience” seriously these are questions which confront us, questions which I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life working through in one way or another, and yet I’ve never written about it. This week I re-read the Conscience section from Phenomenology of Spirit, and I’m going to have a try here at explaining it, and why I believe it to be so central to moral thinking, and why I’m so uncertain of its contemporary status.

Hegel’s chapter named “Conscience. The ‘beautiful soul’, evil and its forgiveness” is the third part of a three part section named “Morality”, which is the first of the three sections that complete the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is one of the final moments, although not the final moment. The following two final moments occur in the sections named “Religion” and “Absolute Knowing”. Since Religion and Absolute Knowing radically transcend individuated experience, it might be said that “Conscience” is the completion of the Phenomenology at the level of personal experience. I don’t think Hegel would say this, because of course Religion, although inherently social, is still active at the level of experience – and even Absolute Knowing is an activity participated in by subjects (by the way, it doesn’t mean you “know everything”, ‘absolute knowing’ is more like the recognition that there is no knowledge which is structurally beyond the possible apprehension of subjects who properly recognize their own relationship to knowledge). But, we can probably safely say that “Conscience” is the resolution that can most straightforwardly be observed and felt at the level of individual inter-subjective consciousness and sociality. Moreover, it is the most emotional of the 3 final sections, both in the relations it describes and in the feelings it wells up in the reader when he or she comes to understand the dynamics at play – this is some of the first philosophy I ever read which immediately changed the way I understood my relations with other people, and even transformed the inter-personal problems I was dealing with at the time of reading and studying this text.

What does Anarchy “really” look like?

At yesterdays day of action for Civil Liberties a police officer stood at the side of Spadina, exercising his democratic rights of free speech. He yelled slogans such as “Anarchists can kiss my ass” and “You don’t know what real anarchy looks like”.

It made me wonder what he meant by “real anarchy”. If by this he means the sudden absence of control by a central authority in a modern capitalist city, then he’s surely right. We don’t know what “real” anarchy looks like, since we haven’t tried it. Or, we might say, we have tried it and it looks like the Detroit Race Riots of 1943, or the New York Draft Riots of 1863. These incidents of the breakdown of order in a densely populated area had disastrous consequences.

However, it’s wrong to equate “real anarchy” with the absence of all authority, or with the absence of order. “Real anarchy”, which is surely what anarchists wish to achieve, means authority is legitimated from the ground up, and that order is a product of the social fabric – people getting along. There are examples of this, i.e. the police force in Free Derry between August 1971 and July 1972 (I’ve already written about this here).

It is true, however, that some anarchists use violence, rioting even, to try to push towards real anarchy. This is called insurrectionist anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchism, and its precedent illegalism, holds that violent conflict with established power structures is the only way to bring the popular masses to recognize the illegitimacy of current state structures. It is obsessed with the idea that Anarchist propeganda/public relations must be concrete actions, and that the uprising of the most excluded of society will lead to a wider and wider rebellion against the state.

Two points must be made about insurrectionist anarchism. First is that it is almost certainly wrong. Our society is not constantly on the brink of a rebellion, representation propaganda i.e. the media is almost certainly more powerful than “concrete propaganda” of destructive acts – especially since these destructive acts are portrayed in a manner which justifies to the mainstream more police oppression.

Second, however, it is crucial not to associate the methods of one or any breed of anarchism with “real anarchy”. The methods by which a political movement attempts to gain power is not the essence of that political movement. This would be akin to associating the methods of Robespierre during the Terror with “real democracy”, or the violence of the revolution of October, 1917 with “real communism”.

Anarchy is a serious political philosophy, and a real option for how we might more fairly organize and govern communities.  At the same time, we live in a city and country where “black baiting” is starting to hearken back to the red-baiting of the 1950s. If we are serious about open, civil discourse, if we are serious about our values of free speech, it is crucial that we do not fall into easy simplifications which allow the police to put peaceful organizers in jail.

Heidegger on Americanism and Democracy: in what way might the G20 exemplify our lack of a homeland?

The public hatred of Martin Heidegger after the Second World War is more due to his lack of condemnation of the Nazi regime, and his silence on the subject of concentration camps, than to his own involvement with the party in 1933-34. So I think it’s pretty important to understand why this response is absent from Heidegger’s later work. From whither Heidegger’s silence on the Nazis and the Holocaust?

Firstly, we might look at the fact that Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust was only partial. He in fact did, in a 1949 presentation state

“Agriculture is now a motorized food industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”

The Trip So Far

My European tour 2010 promises to be quite an adventure. A Castle of philosophy in Ireland, a friend in Belfast, and then some mountainous adventures in Switzerland, and hopefully a little hop in to France at the end!

But, my trip to the Castle in Ireland is a voyage in itself. Check here for photos so far. Yesterday I took the 7am train from Toronto to Montreal, to catch a 7pm flight out to Heathrow. The train was uneventful, and I did quite a bit of reading. I read the first hundred pages of “The Weathermakers” by Tim Flannery, a book I actually found on the street on my way to the subway station. The book is good, although a bit out of date (2005). It’s general message – the science is certain enough and we need to start acting to slow global warming – remains true today, with increasing urgency (although, from any reasoned perspective, the urgency was quite great back in 2005 as well). Urgency, however, is not rational – it’s an emotion. Hopefully the emotion or urgency with respect to action on climate change increases in the near future – otherwise, as I learned from Hansen’s book, the venus syndrome is a real possibility.

However, I hadn’t meant to read that book, and I have course reading to finish before the start of the philosophy program on Monday, so I abandoned the book in Montreal. I had quite a good time there, despite only having a half-day. Simon was just finishing packing, and like Totem park and Fairview residences, there was much free-stuff to be had. I took some tea, because I like the idea of having english breakfast tea in my residence room in a castle. We went to the “OP”, which is an outdoor beer garden on the last day of school. We hate charity samosas, and drank 4 beers for 10 dollars – and good beers from the McAusland brewery – Ambroise Blonde, and Griffin extra-blonde ales. The “moment” of the beer garden was standing in line, hearing someone behind the counter yell “We’re out of Moosehead!”. Simon and I laughed expansively – who drinks Moosehead?

Simon’s friends continue to impress me – I met a good number at the beer garden and they remind me highly of people I would have met in first year. Not to say I’m nostalgic – I like my friends now, and I like being friends with 25-35 year olds. But I love the creativity, open-ness of smart kids just getting started. It really makes me think about what kind of school I’d like to teach in – I’ve had fantastic experiences teaching philosophy in high school for short periods, and generally disappointing experiences teaching philosophy at York. My empirical conclusion was to perhaps not teach university philosophy – but perhaps its more a matter of which university one teaches at. The best would be to teach in an integrated first year program like Arts Legacy at McGill, or the defunct Foundations Program at UBC (which still has its website!)

My flight to the UK was delayed 3 hours on the tarmac due to a broken radio. “Everyone knows how the number 2 radio works until it stops working”, I said to the man sitting next to me, and then followed with Jordan Peterson‘s story of a crashed computer caused by instability in the sun. The man I sat next to was actually quite interesting – from Pakistan, moved to Canada in 1989 because he was not able to get a US passport. Upon arriving in Canada, immediately moved to the US, but moved back in 3 days due to hating it. He really noticed a difference between people in Canada and in the United States, and after experiencing it first hand, no longer had an interest in becoming a US citizen. He now works as a chef in Saint-Hyacinthe, near to Sainte Madelaine where I spent a week in grade 6 on an exchange trip. (I’ve been thinking about that trip a lot recently – mostly because I really could do the J’Explore program next year and justify it as a scholarly activity. Apparently doing J’Explore in a small town is like going back to elementary school, mom included (your home-stay parents are paid to cook for you and do your laundry!), except you are old enough to drink.) He still owns shops in Pakistan, and travels back yearly to pay taxes, etc… He agrees that flying is insane – it’s shooting through the sky in a thin tube full of too many people.

He asked me about 2012, what my perspective was on it as a philosopher. I told him about how eschatology is thought within the German Phenomenological tradition – how the idea that the overturning would occur at a single moment in time is (thought to be) due to a mistaken interpretation of time itself. However, I think within the right interpretation of temporality, there is something eschatological about time, and it has something to do with something like “gods”, the divinities, the non-human. I actually believe Global warming might be the “in the face of an absent god” which Heidegger foresaw as a manner of humans “going under” in the Der Spiegel interview. For effect, I might as well cite the relevant passage here:

Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

This translation is confusing – I’ve seen “meaningless deaths” translated as “go under” in other places. Another indication that Jim is right and I must learn German, at least Scholar’s German. Anyway, the point is, humanity will not go-under without facing its own inability to recognize that which is radically other to it, that which radically exceeds its power. Global warming is such a phenomena – because while we might know the technical solutions, we do not know how to deal with the socio-psychic blockades against action. Capitalism, insofar as it reproduces irrationality, can either be seen as a lack (humans failing to be perfectly rational), or, we might need to face that humanity has something barbarous about it, and therefore it is not due to something inhuman that we fail to act to save the planet – but rather due to something deeply human, or at least western-historical.

Anyway, the good news is I was booked executive class to Ireland. This is good not because of the flight itself, but because it means i have access to the executive lounge during the 4 hour delay. This lounge is amazing – free expensive beer, expensive wine, expensive food. Rich people sure know to live. What strikes me most about it, however, is the absence of advertising, the total absence of commercialization of the space. This isn’t to say the space is neutral – it privileges certain kinds of body movement, intellectual style (through which newspapers and magazines are available for free), and diet (not so many vegan options). But, there is nothing about the space encouraging me to buy things I don’t need, or to over-consume. The amazing thing about a fridge full of free beer in a place like this is that no one over-drinks. I’ve said before that I think we should get rid of most restaurants and replace them with free food supply for all (non-luxury). I think this would reduce over-eating radically, because of the diminishing marginal price of fast food (always a “better deal” if you supersize). The fact that it works here indicates that it could work in the rest of society – all that’s required is the destruction of the public relations industry.

I should get back to readings for the philosophy program.

On being complicit

The logic of “complicity” or tacet approval is popular with activists today. As someone who associates with (but does not strictly subscribe to, as if it were a publication) Veganism, I often am subject to the argument: “but isn’t it always wrong to be complicit in the exploitation of animals?”.

Yes. It is always wrong to be complicit in the exploitation of animals. However, it is always wrong to be complicit in the carrying out of any evil, be it individual or structural, and the society we live in is one of pervasive evils of both kinds. Simply by “not acting”, by ignoring political, social, animal violence, one is tacitly approving of a system which constantly violates the ideals by which it justifies itself. And by “acting”, there are countless other instances and forms of violence which by not concentrating on, one ignores, and tacitly approves by de-valueing that injustice with respect to another.

I would therefore, assert another kind of complicity – complicity in the idea that you are not guilty. The idea that one can be “consistent” in one’s actions, that one can avoid being a “hypocrite” today, is the greatest hypocrisy. Everyone holds ideals which they have the duty to demand the world to uphold, but they do not have the capacity to even speak in the most empty theoretical manner all these demands. The proper form of ethics in a world of infinite demand is not self-consistency, or taking up every single struggle available. Rather – it is coming to be aware of the hypocrisy which everyone is guilty of but few can be blamed for. The actions of those who do unspeakable violence are never justifiable, but they are comprehensible, understandable – we can see the humanity in their violence. Refusing to see humanity in the violent actors and structures of the world is to fall prey to radical ressentiment, a nihilism which says “No!” to all the world because that world does not live up to an ideal, which, thought generated out of the world, finds itself structured over-against it as a target which cannot be reached.

The answer is not to “not be complicit”, therefore, but to be complicit in the right way. To be complicit in such a way that attention is drawn to your complicity, to bring to light the hypocrisies which we all live with, ignore, “rise above”, etc… It is great ideology to confuse, for instance, eating a hamburger at MacDonalds with a genuine relation of human to animal on a genuine farm. However, it is greater ideology to assume that there was nothing, could never have been nothing, about the genuine relationship to animals on farms which the MacDonalds experience functions by referencing towards. There is something true in that relation, and there is therefore something true in the MacDonalds experience as well – although this is not a truth of “correctness” but a revealing which is buried over by all simplistic analysis which reduces the relation to food to the logic of resource, exploitation, and sentience.

The relationship between humans and their ideals is not simple – it can not be captured under the simple logic which states “we know our ideals, the task is to make ourselves equal to them” because it is never clear in advance what the real force of an ideal will be – these are empirical questions, to be worked out after history, and therefore the speculative projected answers in advance can never be given in the form of a certainty.

I therefore advocate the posture of struggle, of admitted guilt, of confusion – over the self righteous religious zealotry which claims not only to understand all the violences in the world today (which certainly does in the form of a recognition), but to at the same time understand the underlying causes and solutions to those violences. In other words, what we should stop naively asserting with positive certainty that the solution is always inherent in the problem as a potency which shows up in actuality as the motive for that problem’s condemnation.

On Topics for Writing: “Hot Cognition” and Play

Earlier this term I wrote a list of ten topics that I need to write on. These are not topics on which I have complete expertise, but they are issues on which I have opinions which ought be communicated. I thought I could write on one a day, or one every few days, and that this practice of writing would help ground me, help preserve what had already been achieved in my thinking, and keep me on the path towards thinking new thoughts.

However, as it turns out, it is far easier to come up with a topic, and to talk about it in class or at a bar, than it is to actually write a short piece (i.e. 500 to 1000 words). What I envisioned were a set of blog articles, written in a conversational style. And, I have written some (for example, “Carbon Ethics and Future Worlds“, and “Chic-ness and Cheapness – the materiality of the modern aesthetic”). These entries, and “the list”, were inspired by what I felt was a strength developing in my writing/thinking – a strength at communicating difficult ideas to a general audience by remaining alongside examples that are poignant and contemporary (i.e. “Time and Engagement in the Present“). However, those entries were written while I was gripped by a certain situation, a concern, a need to preserve and communicate a thought.

Many years ago in my first year of University studies, Dennis Danielson spoke to my foundations class on the topic of “hot cognition” – the state of mind you are in when your existence is held by concern for a topic, when you literally “need” to find something out, and express it. It’s what makes people enjoy school, enjoy writing papers and presentations and teaching. Like marital love, it isn’t always “simply there”, but must be continually fostered, cherished, nourished. Treating “topics” as a list mistakes concernful engagement for either “work” or “play” or “enjoyable pastime”.

Writing, which is work, is not a pass-time. It is not “play” in the sense of “a way to unwind”. But it is play in the sense of imaginative engagement! Do adults any longer play? Not when “play” is opposed to work – for as any child knows, play is hard work! On “Play” see Derrida’s “Structure Sign and Play“, or James May’s television series “Toy Stories“.

Of course writing, at least philosophical writing, is play. It is a play of concepts, of ideas. But, like building an entire english garden out of plasticine, it is hard work. Topics therefore cannot be treated as something to be completed “at one’s leisure”, but rather must be actively pursued, chased after, struggled with. They can not be “completed”, “in order”, but rather in the order by which they engage the author. Writers do not choose topics – they are chosen by them.

That all said, I still intend on pursuing this “list of topics”, because preserving what was attempted is an essential value for moving forward.

Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal is free. This means you don’t have to pay, (except for some temporary exhibitions). That and the collection is quite astonishing – including the likes of Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, etc… There is also a serious ancient Greece exhibit which, unlike the ROM’s, doesn’t pretend that Roman copies of Greek statues are Greek. There is an excellent exhibit on 20th century style and design. There is an expansive collection of European painting between the 15th and 19th centuries.

In other words, there is enough here that one can get a sense of the entire history of painting in a day. As such, welcome to Tristan’s comprehensive theory of European painting. Just kidding of course, but even a cursory look through does reveal some very interesting events. First off, Painting seems to have progressed quite slowly between the 15 and 19th centuries – many pieces from the early 19th century could be confused with things painted hundreds of years earlier. Basically, until Monet, the advances seem to be mostly technical – as far as style is concerned, there are 14th century landscapes and portraits that look like early 19th century works by lesser painters.

With Monet, however, the codes seem to break down. “Impressionism” means the self-consciously recognized product of painting is emotional. The symbolic codes become the object of play (Picasso), and dismissal (painting black squares). Rejection of symbolic codes for a time is revolutionary (dada), but is later co-opted by the same system it wishes not to reproduce (dada on Starbucks water bottles).

What is most amazing about this history is how, taking Monet as a fulcrum, we can see such a disparate rate of change of artistic style on either historical side – before, 300 years of relative calm – after, less than a hundred before the codes have completely broken down. Of course, they do not disappear – symbolic painting and representational painting persist, but persist as one code among many options.  The old code was not characterized by its properties, its attributes, but by it being the-code, the dominant – not one part of a plurality.
The reason the current age can be said to “have no style” is not that there are no trends in design, not that no one is doing anything new in sculpture or painting or furniture – but rather that no unified code develops amongst people ever inventing the new. Foundings ever repeat, but do not take hold. There are too many choices, freedoms, possibilities. The system embraces it’s own deconstruction. The post-modern self is the one products are marketed towards.

The arrival of the future. Part 3 of 3: BMW’s GINA project

You might be wondering how a concept car could signal that the future has already arrived. Concept vehicles, we normally think, project futures that may or may not arrive. For instance, the minivan was first shown by Lancia in 1978 – but it didn’t “arrive” until Chrysler’s great success in the 1980s.

However, what we can see happening in BMW’s GINA project is a bit different. On one level, the project is promoting a new way to think about building cars. Traditionally cars have a body and a frame – the rigidity of the car comes from the frame, and the body gives the car its appearance, its shape. In order to make cars lighter, there has been a tendency to reduce the importance of the frame with “unibody” construction methods, in which the body is a stressed member of the chassis, bolted to a sub-frame. Making the body an integral part of a car’s rigidity allows it to be lighter and stiffer. This idea comes to a radical point with Jaguar’s aluminum exoskeleton construction – where the frame of the car is basically its skin. If the skin is made from carbon fiber, exoskeleton construction can produce even more extreme results.

Another tendency in car lightening, embodied perhaps most famously in the Corvette, is to put all the rigidity of a car in its frame or space-frame, and cover it with a light plastic or fiberglass body. Or, in the case of the Ariel Atom, not to cover it with no body at all.

On the surface, the GINA project is simply an Ariel Atom covered in cloth. However, Chris Bangle is up to something altogether more interesting – what we see happening here is the matter and the form of the car interacting in a wholly new way. Before project GINA the shape of a car is a compromise between an artistic ideal and material constraints. Car designers would like to do one thing, but safety legislation, the need for aerodynamics and economy constrain their creativity. Of course, the best automotive designers are those who can turn this opposition into a synergy. Ian Callum is probably the greatest car designer of this type.

The GINA project departs most radically from past car design in that the shape of the car is not drawn in advance in clay models and then instantiated in hard plastic or metal body panels. Rather, the shape itself is a product of the stretching of a cloth skin over metal hoops. The form of the car is literally engendered out of the matter. That on its own is nothing new, but BMW’s project is different because the flexibility of the skin doesn’t have utilitarian goals, but emotional ones instead. It isn’t form for the sake of function, or form following function, but function for the sake of form – or more specifically, for the sake of emotional affect. Usually we’d say the form of a thing is for the sake of affect (a car has a beautiful shape to provoke an emotional response). But in GINA, the matter itself has an emotional function.

In fact, “Form/matter” language breaks down trying to talk about this object – the form is not just a product of the matter, it is the matter. By this I mean that in the outward image of the vehicle, in what we see when we look, we literally “see” the matter – the stretchiness of the fabric. This is most pronounced in the video when the shape of the car changes – a spoiler raises up at the back of the car at high speed, the fabric in the doors creases as they open, the headlights open up. We even see the translucence of the material in the break lights, since the lights shine through the skin. If the car were here we could also touch it – and we would want to touch it far more than we desire to touch metal or plastic cars – and that desire is part of the emotional product the designers are aiming at.

Some of you might be familiar with Chris Bangles work on BMWs that have gone into production. In general it can be said he’s quite unpopular, and since he’s been dismissed BMW’s styling has returned somewhat to its conservative roots. However, it should be said that the role of a stylist is not merely to make beautiful objects, but to break new ground – produce new styling language – make it possible to say things in design which were impossible before. People familiar with architecture might not be terribly surprised to learn that Bangle considers Frank Gehry an important influence. Whether that means we can say Bangle was indirectly influenced by sculptor Richard Serra I’m not sure – could the controversial looks of the current BMW M5 somehow be traced to the controversy of Tilted Arc? Could the matter-form interplay in GINA have anything to do with Shift?

So, why does GINA signal the future having arrived? Simply because it shows that design can catch up with art, that emotion can become a product, and that form doesn’t need to either overshadow or proceed from function.

The arrival of the future. Part 2 of 3: Unmaned Aerial Vehicles

As children the notion of unmanned aerial attack vehicles, engaging human targets with their computer brains, was reserved for the realm of dystopian science fiction. However, vehicles that can fly autonomously are possessed by the military of the United States and Israel. Machines that engage human targets under no direct supervision by a pilot are thus no longer the realm of imagination – but of ethical discussion. Milan has discussed the topic on his blog. Rather than recognize the dystopic aspects of UAVs, he prefers to see them in a positive light:

“I think the fact that robots would not be subject to emotions like fear, the desire for vengeance, or lust does provide a reasonable chance that they could be made to behave more ethically than human soldiers.I think the fact that robots would not be subject to emotions like fear, the desire for vengeance, or lust does provide a reasonable chance that they could be made to behave more ethically than human soldiers.”

He is of course, right. Personally, I don’t find the ethical discussion concerning UAV’s particularly compelling. What is interesting is that the US army sees the need to participate in this discussion – see here a report they commissioned on UAVs, responsibility, and laws of war.

On the surface, the discussion surrounding UAVs isn’t futuristic at all. And of course, it isn’t – it’s impossible to have a futuristic discussion about something which already exists. My point is rather that the fact that UAVs are not even recognized as harbingers for a dystopic future is a sign that we are already in it. The cruel joke about the future, featured in Leonard Cohen’s song, the film No Country for Old Men, even Natural Born Killers – is that the future has already arrived. In comparison, even the worst atrocities of the past are easy to comprehend.

From Cohen’s song:

“Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing, Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned the order of the soul”