The manifesto of the perpatrator in last month’s Christchurch massacre has provoked a fair bit of talk of “eco-fascism” — the other right-wing response to the climate crisis besides either welcoming it or flatly denying it is happening. Ostensibly, eco-fascists would align themselves against the apocalypse, lamenting the man-made destruction of nature. But fascists, as ever, look for the solutions to the problems that the existing system of power is bringing about in that very system’s entrenchment. The majority of eco-fascists are openly anti-human, advocating to solve climate change by keeping human life “within strict limits,” typically along racial (and/or national) lines. This is the most intense, violent idiocy: a genocidal solution to a looming extinction event, after all, would simply be a way of carrying on the apocalypse by other means.
Viral Twitter tales are often bullshit, but being made-up isn’t the worst thing about them.
What is truth is an oft asked question, especially online. This is a cool article digging into the plethora of made up stuff on Twitter, you should check it out :)
In his 1999 statement of principles known as the “Minnesota Declaration,” Werner Herzog gave an explanation of his theory of “ecstatic truth”. Cinema Verité, Herzog tells us, deals only with “superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” “One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.’”
In this, Herzog says, such realism “confounds facts and truth”: “Facts create norms, and truth illumination.” But luckily, against the realists, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” In his work (most notably, his documentaries), Herzog seeks this “ecstatic truth”: to reflect reality not how it is on the surface, but how it is on a deep level, beyond the façade of what we merely perceive.
Of course this is difficult, and can go wrong — it can stray into a sort of dishonesty that it is impossible to even contest by means of verification. But when it works, it can tell us something we are unable to reach by means of engagement with surface reality alone — the essential truth, for instance, of engaging with British politics being like a posh teenager disinterestedly daring you to drink a big bucket of vomit and piss.
“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell,” Herzog concludes. “A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species — including man — crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”
This what bothers me about those fake viral Twitter stories. They lack anything like ecstatic truth; they don't reflect or reveal any reality deeper than what they describe. In this, they have only facts — and of course, as it turns out, they don’t even have that. If the stories had never posed as true, they would not have gone viral in the slightest. Like A Million Little Pieces or the hoax misery memoirs of JT Leroy, these stories need — regardless of any other formal accomplishments — to pose as true in order to make an impact on their audience. (Once you realize it’s not true, the Morris thread is literally just a guy saying: “Oh, and then this happened! And then hero (who I've made up) outwitted the drug dealers — wow! And he got away with it! Juh? How cool!”). Likewise, the Didn't Happen lads seem determined to reduce all truth to mere facts, completely blind to the possibility that there could be more to the world than that — they don't care about ecstatic truth at all.
The internet is causing more and more fake things to leak into our consciousness every day. But this is only really a problem if the fakes don't contribute anything to our understanding of the world. We need to stop asking: is this true? We must instead ask: supposing this is true... what is its truth worth?
Sure, being told you have potential can mess a person up, but don’t trace all your adult shortcomings back to grade school.
“The other day, I came across this piece by Mark Fisher — an extract from k-punk, the forthcoming posthumous collection of his writings. This piece pointed me to a blog post from 2014 by something called the Institute for Precarious Consciousness. In this piece, the Institute argues that every phase of capitalism has a “dominant affect”: a dominant emotional orientation, which functions in part as a way of controlling people — although it is also, the authors claim, a pole around which resistance to the established order can coalesce. Once, this dominant affect was misery; until around 40 years ago it was boredom. But nowadays, in the age of neoliberal capitalism, the dominant affect is anxiety.
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These problems have been compounded by the effects of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Certainly surveillance and micromanagement were an increasingly prominent part of everyday life even before then — from Supernanny to the War on Terror. But there was, back then, still a sense that if you kept your head down and submitted to all of society’s various anxiety-generating rituals, your life really could improve...
But then suddenly, at around the time that I – and, I’m guessing, a lot of people who identify with the Gifted-Kid Burnout meme – started university, all the old opportunities there used to be to get on in the world, to secure a good and hopefully non-precarious job, to fulfill all your parents’ expectations of you... just, sort of... disappeared. And no matter how much you, or anyone else, kept on surveilling, kept on micromanaging, they still haven’t come back. Now all we have left is the anxiety: the endless, painful side-effect of a ritual which has long since ceased to have any even coincidentally beneficial effects.
It strikes me that this constitutes a much better explanation for what is really behind Gifted-Kid Burnout. This is why so many people feel they used to be on the right track as a kid, but aren’t now. You haven’t failed because your preternatural brilliance meant you never had to learn hard graft — you’re failing because the world simply hasn’t provided you with the opportunities you would have needed to flourish. All it has given you — all it is interested, really, in giving you — is the yawning vertigo of anxiety. But unfortunately — and this is where, I’m afraid, the people who hate the Gifted-Kid Burnout meme really do have a point — wallowing in whatever sadness you have about how your life has turned out probably won’t help.
Probably my favourite line in The Communist Manifesto is the one where Marx and Engels say that under capitalism, the past dominates the present; in Communist society by contrast, the present will dominate the past. We can’t let our own pasts, or even just our images of them, continue to dominate our horrible, anxiety-ridden presents. This can’t possibly be easy, especially given how determined the world seems to be to break us. But regardless of how much you might feel like you’ve betrayed the promise you once seemed to exhibit as a child, everyone needs to find ways of taking action, to change the way the economy is organized and through this break the grip anxiety seems to have over all our consciousnesses today. Which is all to say: radicalize the gifted kids.”
Perhaps if any sort of positive political program could be associated with this sort of professional intellectual hobbyism, it would be a closed, stoic acceptance that evil will happen anyway, so we may as well live our lives as best we can while coming to terms with it. But this not only seems foolishly fatalistic, it also seems callously individualistic — as individuals we might give up, and tend to the inside of our own heads, but what gives us the right not to fight for everyone else?
But certainly there is a sense, in this age, of culture (and politics) being something that bombards — an endless deluge of new events that one is never able to obtain the requisite distance from to really understand.
