“In the course of the last several decades, modern media has woven around us a tangled web of clamorous illusions and dancing lights whose function is to divert, confound, and bewitch an increasingly anxious populace while inuring it to the realities of life outside the “green zones” of Western privilege.” ~J.F. Martel

Whatever its benefits for the prolongation of human life, material progress has exacted a high price from the earth and its inhabitants.

Of the many crises that threaten us today—environmental devastation, geopolitical chaos, natural disaster, climate change—one tends to get short shrift in the litanies of the apocalypse: the replacement of culture by the ethos of the market.

Granted, in a time of global crisis, any discussion of the importance of “mere” culture, let alone the place of the arts in society, will seem superfluous to many. Yet even a brief glance at the scintillating landscape of our age will reveal how vital a role the aesthetic plays in reshaping the world in the name of progress.

In so-called open societies, ideology is propagated using the techniques of art. That is to say that the aesthetic realm—the domain of feeling—is the locus where the potentialities of the social system are actualized or condemned. Freedom of thought finds its counterweight today in the systematic control of feeling.

One of the primary functions of the mediasphere is to concoct moods, which then become determining factors as to what is deemed possible or impossible for society as a whole. As Slavoj Zizek has often pointed out, we are constantly told that our wildest dreams are about to come true, that modern science is poised to cure cancer, allow us to live to 150, and remake our bodies at the molecular level.

However, the mere suggestion of global financial reform is met with scorn across the mainstream, even though the idea of such reforms is both sounder and simpler, from a strictly rational point of view, than the wild promises of transhumanists and TED talkers. In other words, the prevailing mood dictates that while everything is possible within the perimeters of the market, any alteration of the perimeters themselves is unconscionable.

Contrary to what TED would have us believe, ideas have no power in and of themselves; they become potent only when the ambient emotional climate charges them with enough punch to break through the consensus trance and become real possibilities. There is no effect without affect. Continue reading →