Against Nomadism
“We are all nomads now,” declared Constant Nieuwenhuys in 1956, leaving the question open as to whether we should be entirely happy about this fact. Nomad also means fugitive, and a surveilance society with no need to take prisoners. Terrorist hearts, smart-tatooed skins, and no-use-for-a-mouth under this thousand year reich, except either for pledging allegiance, or swallowing sweetly the line – or else in flight on the surface of the cellular earth, encircled by spy satellites and predator drones.
In his book of the same name, and elsewhere as well, Paul Virilio has discussed the concept of polar inertia – in short, getting nowhere fast: the idea that under conditions of late capitalism our most blessed of all planets has reached a point of terminal velocity, and thus delivered itself into a glacial stasis: like the undead aviator Howard Hughes, impotent and friendless in the Desert Inn Hotel, surrounded by Mormons and watching endless repeats of Ice Station Zebra.
This sad fate, or something like it, is not just a freak insurrection of incidental desire pathology, but rather the natural and inevitable outcome of the kind of desperate lifestyle anarcho-nomadism Hughes served to herald, if not yet embody. The logic here is double - on the level of affect, the insatiable need for speed and cunt, on the level of the law, the elevation of boredom into an ethical principle. Hughes himself took these two different trips in sequence, thus at least managing to preserve a little personality along the way - his contemporary spiritual children, on the other hand, have fused them together, like a speedball.
Hence, the evil host of psychic car-wrecks, twisted mutant remades combining desperate exhibitionism with almost autistic affective flatness, which presently dominates our current necromantic society. This condition is exemplified by the reality television show Big Brother – an almost conceptually impossible production, which seems to have perfected the technique of sustaining grotesque inanity and rank psychosis, together, indefinitely, on the same basic unchanging and unwavering room tone sine-wave hum of total dreariness – a truly remarkable technical achievment.
Make no mistake: truly, what the Pyramids were to the Egyptians, and the Parthenon to the Ancient Greeks, Big Brother is to our own civilization – namely, the very incarnation of every value and desires it holds dear, the sacred place where those values and desires can be encountered at their purest. Contingency, flexibility, precarity – the battle hymn of the new reformed republic, where else can this tripartite ban of all modern thought be percieved so sublimely and perfectly as in the spectacular facility-of-exploitation provided to all participating media outlets by easily disposable, use-once-and-throw-away, non-celebrities, like the dirty hit stars of the syndicated screen?
“I admire Hughes,” Ballard once commented caustically, “above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on a couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets…Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes.” Under discussion here is a reality which, over the last thirty-eight years – since the Soixante-Huitard non-event - has systematically moved to assassinate truth whenever it has encountered it; worked to reduce love to sexuality and call this liberation; redefine science as wisdom – like tarot or astrology - and say this is spiritual progress; bury art under culture - and then claim that art can be anything; and replace politics with hysterical impotence – why not a sing a cute little song about it, and then we all will save Africa? Howard Hughes spent his last years in Las Vegas, carefully archiving his own urine – in many respects, this appears a cool move in relation.
1,2,3,4… The predatory and pathological James Bond, with a new girl on his arm in every movie, never the same, and yet somehow, always the same. It would not even be so tragic, if at least he was aware of his own imbilicity. Program for a revolutionary détournement of James Bond: James Bond is an old man, MI6 has dispensed with his services, he is shown visiting gay porno theatres, National Front pubs, losing a bet on a horse, losing his nerve over an actual encounter, picking fag butts off the street, sadly filling out a local election ballot for New Labour to stop a resurgent Respect in his local constituency, etc…The dreary endless stream of self-help manuals written by gimcrack gurus in sharkskin suits, instructing the existentially impoverished how to actualize themselves and unveil reality. If they only really did, and saw the void, then this would be be something. But then again, not something comforting - at least not immediately. Mom and dad in essence masks tend to make for better sales, in our sad age where people prefer the familiar to the Real. The monotonous repetitition of the same insipid and irrelevent pseudo-intellectual journalese polemics every time the insipid and irrelevent Turner Prize is announced – “But is it art?” the crowd cry as one, in an orgy of strident individualism and clear-thinking dissent. The Stuckists are boring and stupid, but at least they have this much right: 2001 winner Charles Saatchi, 2002 Sir Nicholas Serota, 2003 Sir Nicholas Serota…The steady proliferation of radically infantile-alternative groups - such as CIRCA, such as the Space Hijackers, speaking in the borrowed rhetoric of their betters, and already dedicated on the level of their manifesto commitments to bravely and resolutely changing absolutely nothing. This, and then on the other side of the hyperpassive/hyperactive divide, the idiot fascist thugs of the state-subsidized Black Block, actually actively fighting to change nothing - what is especially depressing, is that not all of these people are cynical agents, some of them are really sincere.
The central problem with all of this is expressed neatly by the slogan that Burning Man (perhaps the supreme example of contemporary anarcho-nomadic yuppie smugness) has proudly taken for its mantra: leave no trace. Intended to express a certain kind of basic sense of ecological care, in fact it denotes the opposite – a kind of bloody-minded apathetic stupidity, since (as is abundantly clear to everyone with eyes) the continued existence of the Burning Man festival - with its much-trumpeted gift economy, self-proclaimed radical self-reliance, self-satisfied radical self-expression - depends completely on the material surplusses generated by superefficient American capitalism. To drive to the desert, take acid, and fuck is all very well – but to claim it is inherently ethical is frankly ridiculous.
The point here is not to hypocritically castigate complicity itself – to a certain extent, living where we do, and as we do, we are all complicit - such is the state. Rather, the point here instead, in a certain sense, is simply to point this fact out. In opposition both to bourgeois morality, always so careful and keen to establish that the source of the evil resides in this inaccessible outside, as well as vulgar nomadism, this phony, becoming-capital dream of ultimately somehow locating oneself in this outside, we need to ruthlessly assume the full implications of Gandhi’s famous maxim: “Become the change you want to see in the world.”
In his book of the same name, and elsewhere as well, Paul Virilio has discussed the concept of polar inertia – in short, getting nowhere fast: the idea that under conditions of late capitalism our most blessed of all planets has reached a point of terminal velocity, and thus delivered itself into a glacial stasis: like the undead aviator Howard Hughes, impotent and friendless in the Desert Inn Hotel, surrounded by Mormons and watching endless repeats of Ice Station Zebra.
This sad fate, or something like it, is not just a freak insurrection of incidental desire pathology, but rather the natural and inevitable outcome of the kind of desperate lifestyle anarcho-nomadism Hughes served to herald, if not yet embody. The logic here is double - on the level of affect, the insatiable need for speed and cunt, on the level of the law, the elevation of boredom into an ethical principle. Hughes himself took these two different trips in sequence, thus at least managing to preserve a little personality along the way - his contemporary spiritual children, on the other hand, have fused them together, like a speedball.
Hence, the evil host of psychic car-wrecks, twisted mutant remades combining desperate exhibitionism with almost autistic affective flatness, which presently dominates our current necromantic society. This condition is exemplified by the reality television show Big Brother – an almost conceptually impossible production, which seems to have perfected the technique of sustaining grotesque inanity and rank psychosis, together, indefinitely, on the same basic unchanging and unwavering room tone sine-wave hum of total dreariness – a truly remarkable technical achievment.
Make no mistake: truly, what the Pyramids were to the Egyptians, and the Parthenon to the Ancient Greeks, Big Brother is to our own civilization – namely, the very incarnation of every value and desires it holds dear, the sacred place where those values and desires can be encountered at their purest. Contingency, flexibility, precarity – the battle hymn of the new reformed republic, where else can this tripartite ban of all modern thought be percieved so sublimely and perfectly as in the spectacular facility-of-exploitation provided to all participating media outlets by easily disposable, use-once-and-throw-away, non-celebrities, like the dirty hit stars of the syndicated screen?
“I admire Hughes,” Ballard once commented caustically, “above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on a couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets…Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes.” Under discussion here is a reality which, over the last thirty-eight years – since the Soixante-Huitard non-event - has systematically moved to assassinate truth whenever it has encountered it; worked to reduce love to sexuality and call this liberation; redefine science as wisdom – like tarot or astrology - and say this is spiritual progress; bury art under culture - and then claim that art can be anything; and replace politics with hysterical impotence – why not a sing a cute little song about it, and then we all will save Africa? Howard Hughes spent his last years in Las Vegas, carefully archiving his own urine – in many respects, this appears a cool move in relation.
1,2,3,4… The predatory and pathological James Bond, with a new girl on his arm in every movie, never the same, and yet somehow, always the same. It would not even be so tragic, if at least he was aware of his own imbilicity. Program for a revolutionary détournement of James Bond: James Bond is an old man, MI6 has dispensed with his services, he is shown visiting gay porno theatres, National Front pubs, losing a bet on a horse, losing his nerve over an actual encounter, picking fag butts off the street, sadly filling out a local election ballot for New Labour to stop a resurgent Respect in his local constituency, etc…The dreary endless stream of self-help manuals written by gimcrack gurus in sharkskin suits, instructing the existentially impoverished how to actualize themselves and unveil reality. If they only really did, and saw the void, then this would be be something. But then again, not something comforting - at least not immediately. Mom and dad in essence masks tend to make for better sales, in our sad age where people prefer the familiar to the Real. The monotonous repetitition of the same insipid and irrelevent pseudo-intellectual journalese polemics every time the insipid and irrelevent Turner Prize is announced – “But is it art?” the crowd cry as one, in an orgy of strident individualism and clear-thinking dissent. The Stuckists are boring and stupid, but at least they have this much right: 2001 winner Charles Saatchi, 2002 Sir Nicholas Serota, 2003 Sir Nicholas Serota…The steady proliferation of radically infantile-alternative groups - such as CIRCA, such as the Space Hijackers, speaking in the borrowed rhetoric of their betters, and already dedicated on the level of their manifesto commitments to bravely and resolutely changing absolutely nothing. This, and then on the other side of the hyperpassive/hyperactive divide, the idiot fascist thugs of the state-subsidized Black Block, actually actively fighting to change nothing - what is especially depressing, is that not all of these people are cynical agents, some of them are really sincere.
The central problem with all of this is expressed neatly by the slogan that Burning Man (perhaps the supreme example of contemporary anarcho-nomadic yuppie smugness) has proudly taken for its mantra: leave no trace. Intended to express a certain kind of basic sense of ecological care, in fact it denotes the opposite – a kind of bloody-minded apathetic stupidity, since (as is abundantly clear to everyone with eyes) the continued existence of the Burning Man festival - with its much-trumpeted gift economy, self-proclaimed radical self-reliance, self-satisfied radical self-expression - depends completely on the material surplusses generated by superefficient American capitalism. To drive to the desert, take acid, and fuck is all very well – but to claim it is inherently ethical is frankly ridiculous.
The point here is not to hypocritically castigate complicity itself – to a certain extent, living where we do, and as we do, we are all complicit - such is the state. Rather, the point here instead, in a certain sense, is simply to point this fact out. In opposition both to bourgeois morality, always so careful and keen to establish that the source of the evil resides in this inaccessible outside, as well as vulgar nomadism, this phony, becoming-capital dream of ultimately somehow locating oneself in this outside, we need to ruthlessly assume the full implications of Gandhi’s famous maxim: “Become the change you want to see in the world.”
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