ABlog

The Guantánamo suicides. Suicide as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Suicide as “a good P.R. move.” Suicide as self-determination. Suicide as pragmatic response to the problem of an unbearable existence. Suicide as a text: “This is my letter to the World/that never wrote to Me”—and in fact stood by while I was systematically stripped of every possibility of meaningful communication.

At Guantánamo—horror rivaling the horror of physical torment—the “health” of the prisoner’s body is turned against him. The detainee is forbidden to damage his own flesh lest he undermine the premise that his very existence has become the property of his captors. I, the Supreme, the Decider of your fate, arrogate to myself the function of that Christian deity who was formerly supposed to forbid suicide because the individual’s physical envelope is not his to dispose of, but Mine—Mine alone.

Like slaves on a ship in mid-ocean, closely watched lest they attempt to cast themselves into the sea and so cheat the master.

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I return to the peculiarity of our situation as a self-aware species that has not merely dared to bring its unconscious fantasies of self-extinction into the light of everyday awareness but has worked tirelessly to realize the practical means of making them come true. Once again, the prerogative of an overbearing god has been usurped by Promethean dolts.

I saw today on Huffington Post that British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking gave a press conference in Hong Kong at which he advocated the colonization of space as the best insurance against the termination of our species that is otherwise likely to result from sudden climate change, nuclear war, a rapidly multiplying pathogen, or some other as yet unforeseen catastrophe. Why am I reminded of the fallout shelter craze? (Remember how people worried about the morality of shooting one’s neighbor if s/he showed up at the fallout shelter door?) What makes Stephen Hawking or anybody else think that the self-offing impulse wouldn’t follow us to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond? Is it really that things just sound more manageable in a small colony than on a large, diverse planet? Who is supposed to be chosen to populate this stellar fallout shelter, anyway? No doubt those approved by the developers, and who better to carry out such an ambitious, expensive scheme than the Most Powerful Nation in Human History? So, no Arabs. No illegal aliens. Nobody queer. Probably a lot of folks from families like that of Senator Inhofe, which has managed to avoid producing anyone un-straight in all of its recorded history. Maybe two or three Black Republicans, since of course we’re going to value outer space's “diversity” every bit as much as we cherish it on earth.

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I’m reading Femme du Monde, Patricia Spears Jones’s bracing, elegant, gorgeously designed new poetry collection from Tia Chucha. Probably it was the memory of just having read a quotation from the Situationists in her poem “Saltimbanque” (Sous les paves, la plage –under the street, the beach) that prompted me to buy Tom McDonough’s Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (October Press/MIT). I ran across the volume while cruising the shelves in the St. Mark’s Bookshop for, unbelievably, the second time in a week. (You see, I was pretending to be an indolent intellectual instead of a wage slave in the knowledge factory—“never work,” said Guy Debord, who, according to an interview with Henri Lefebvre included in the McDonough collection, at one point lived off a combination of family resources and the proceeds from his female companion’s writing of horse horoscopes for papers that covered the racing news). What I’ve read so far has enabled me delightedly to confirm that my novel The Company of Cannibals is post-Situationist fiction. That is, it is concerned with an attempted disruption to the Society of the Spectacle. As Greil Marcus explains it, quoting Debord, “The spectacle is ‘the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned’” (9).

The society of the spectacle is the consumption-oriented social scheme in which people cease to be the protagonists of their own lives, individual or collective. Theorizing in Western Europe during the postwar economic boom, Debord was concerned with the gap between productive forces and the type of human satisfaction that requires the possibility of spontaneous expression; he noted sardonically that, given a choice between a garbage disposal unit and love, young people were choosing the garbage disposal unit. Pervasive boredom was the seemingly unavoidable condition of modern industrial society. What I note about the post-Situationist era is that the choice now involves not the garbage disposal unit and love but the garbage disposal unit (and/or the IPod) and the continuation of human life on earth. Yet boredom is still pervasive, because even the likelihood of species demise has been reduced to the status of spectacle.

In The Company of Cannibals, my character Paula invents an “art form” that consists of the public destruction of her journals. She acts out in a grotesquely literal fashion the destruction of possibilities for art-making that is the reality of the capitalist marketplace. (The Situationists made much of the requirement for the Dadaists to “destroy” art but perhaps one needn’t have bothered; according to Paula, the artist in contemporary society is in more or less the condition of the Guantánamo detainee, unable to communicate except through self-destruction.) At the same time, though, her followers invent political art forms that combine ritual, memorization, and group actions that rudely disrupt the “diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself.” They are Situationists without knowing it, obeying their Teacher’s commandment to “Make Reality Real.”

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I propose a new literary vehicle, having something in common with both the manifesto and the eulogy. Let’s call it the Apology to the Future.