#decivilizingprocess

[interpassivesubject]

The ocean is a giant healing crystal

Well, I would like to think so, but um yeah, no. I came across this in the caption of an LA-based painter’s instagram who has a sizable following and what could be called an expertly crafted presence for the platform. To generate traffic, the artist performs charmingly amateurish and admittedly hypnotic dance routines that have gone viral, affording her a larger audience, one would imagine, than her paintings could naturally garner since they’re equally amateurish and of no real consequence. Being the curmudgeon/social agnostic/maverick that I am, naturally I bristled at the proposition that the “ocean is a giant healing crystal” mainly bc we as the human race are destroying the oceans (the ocean isn’t healing itself or us; I mean, I need a good beach wknd to recharge my batteries but that’s beside the point ), and secondly, the strategy seems to represent a type of communication specific to sm. Instagram and presumably other sm platforms create dynamics that wildly prioritize such language-it’s almost phatic in its bearing, meaning that it’s an untruth but not necessarily a toxic one that makes extremely damaging claims. It's largely benign and offers a feel good moment that holds hands with the brief meaninglessness of identity tourism. But, it also functions like modern religion or politics in significant ways. It breeds constituency-the primary objective of such persuasive language and some of the other engagement optimization strategies (follow/unfollow, having bots do the work, blatant look-at-me strategies) is to foster a transactive subject on the other end. It isn’t to stimulate “dialogue” or “discourse” which is the traditional call to arms or purported virtue for high art specifically. As the term sounds, a transactive subject is one who is transacted, processed, and unlitaterally effected into behaving in a certain way-to be made to believe that a meaningful exchange has occurred or that a beneficially mediated alliance has been cemented. In contradistinction to a traditional counter-culture’s cliquishness of tone or its decivilizing effects (punk music, trash aesthetics, run of the mill recreational drug use), the new generations version of detachment, which is actually a backward form of attachment, is directly attributable to the confluence of informed boredom of consumers (mixed at time’s with guilt) and silicon valley’s now widely circulated corporate strategies and language that have themselves been phaticized . The irony here is that even considering the bad faith (resulting from global pandemic, civic unrest) that the general population, and especially liberal artist types, have with the real transactive leadership, i.e., politics, media, market elite-what Eric Weinstein calls the sense-making apparatus, personal interactivity amongst a youngish population engaged with something like instagram seems to have profoundly dovetailed with the very same behaviors coming from the top, at least of late. Everything has been normalized with top-down culture in fundamental ways, not in tangential ways. Perhaps older generations’ attempts to carve out a deterritorialized space for themselves functioned in a similarly mimetic way, but consequences look very different nowadays. And at the end of the day, it all seems to circle back around to commerce, homo economicus, and the complex calculus that is surviving in a contemporary society, which may not be worth enjoying if we keep acting like the leaders that we malign.

[lucas-gabriel1]

Rohloff RQ

1. The author is attempting to add another theoretical aspect to the moral concept through the use of the work of Norbert Elias. Explain 'civilizing process' and 'decivilizing process'.

Civilizing process can be explained in terms of civilization. The normative concept of civilization involves the process whereby one group of people come to see themselves as more 'civilized' than another group of people, thereby enabling these self-identified 'civilized' people to commit acts that at other times would be seen as 'uncivilized'. Elias also argued that this process "is in part dependent upon a gradual stabilization of a central state authority, with n associated state monopolization over the forces of violence and taxation" (74). Once a central state authority gains this monopolization over violence and taxation, people become increasingly integrated and interdependent with one another. These changes in return create pressures towards changes in behavior, mutual identification and increased self-restraint, thus creating stable behaviors and relations between people.

In contrast, decivilizing processes are what happens when civilizing processes go into reverse. An example of one of these reversals is a rise in the level of danger and a fall in its calculability. In other words, when danger becomes more incalculable, people's behavior changes as well. An increase in danger or violence is not necessary in the decivilizing process. Instead, the perception of an increase in violence or danger can affect the development of other decivilizing trends.

2. How does the topic of climate change exemplify the author's thesis in the chapter?

Amanda Rohloff includes climate change to illustrate many of her points made throughout the chapter. She also explains climate change in terms of a moral panic and how it can be linked to both civilizing and decivilizing processes. As in other topics, there is a lot of criticism involved with the issue of global warming. For example, when Rohloff wrote an article connecting the topics of climate change and moral panic, she was immediately labeled as skeptical by critics. Campaigns and groups fighting to reduce environmental damages can be viewed as civilizing offenses. However, Rohloff explains that these goals can create a decivilizing process as well. Instead of focusing on a biased feature, climate control can be viewed as an issue of different discourses.