Defamiliarising ourselves with a way of life that is undeniably closing is the theme right now. I wondered why I was having such a grief-like response a full week before lockdown and realise now it was a visceral reaction, a piecing together with faculties outside my 'conscious' mind, of these facts; the fact of collapse, the fact that a pandemic was slowing the world down in ways which it should have back in 2008 when it became evident the current order and it's privately centralised banks, just would not do. And here we are, having had that defunct world system dragged out for a further twelve years, miseries abound, and to the detriment of the species it is not rationality or radical praxis that's bringing cogent attentions to this system's gross discrepancies, but a fucking virus.
Was it really so difficult to isolate and contain a problem of it's scope (the insidious leverage the banks have over every world government, their usurpation of welfare and public access with gig-economies/harrowing fluidity which we're meant to read as 'freedom' etc) only under duress of a secondary crisis, one to exhume the first and create dialect alongside? Not getting overly technical, but historical dialecticism seems to have won out here but amazingly in service to the potential dismantling of it's own structural violence (FYI historical dialecticism is a mode of discourse which gives primacy to history as a narrative and justifies everything and anything in the name of a binary consistency; meaning anything from war to genocide to a pandemic can be turned towards the benefit of the whole, as a kind of transformative collateral). Here's hoping the global reach of this crisis, it's literally-fleshy intimacy as a threat, might topple the mind-tricks otherwise used to justify resuming the status quo when the dust finally settles. Here's hoping the villain of this story (if there needs to be one) ends up being the banks, and that governments can finally out-manoeuvre the hostage situation we've been in to them since certain reformations that gave primacy to finance.
Fuck the fucking banks.
Drinking and eating and generally consuming is like, my life now. I guess it always was but now it's really apparent how the domestic space has been coded as a fortress of 'entertainment', and I'm asking myself what implications does this intimate proximity with a rabid media complex have, what is it's value outside of a crisis, who does it serve?
Obviously industry pundits get a dollar, food production gets a boon because there are junky-caffeinated-sugary consumption habits around entertainment which have historically been sold as 'comforts', which in reality are as insidious as smoking because marketed to be habit forming etcetera. I live with someone who is a gamer, and who has recently admitted to me that when they're not being constantly inundated with media (gaming, frankly terrible music, watching a shitty movie) they feel acute anxiety. I know there's not much to do in isolation if you don't have clear 'working from home' parameters but this person's clear addiction, seeing them deny what could otherwise be a period of introspection and a re-inscribing of themselves in a shifting world order, is really starting to bum me out.
But I also don't want to judge any person's reaction to this, or how they see fit to wile away the enforced time at home; but on the other hand I don't want to endorse infantile behaviours which might seem harmless but which mostly lead to active disempowerment. Yuck.
So yes, actively defamiliarising with everything we've taken for granted about this way of life, the petty consumption habits which we don't necessarily think about in terms of a resource expenditure because their initial cost seems trivial, is perhaps something worth doing right now, because if anything what's happening should teach us that no cost is trivial, that every expenditure (monetary or other) accumulates and plays out in time. This lesson is inherent to this pandemic because the virus and it's spread are the ambience of industrial-consumerist processes in critical stages. They are the result of a metric that has no remainder, in which every factor of late-stage capitalism has contributed; population bursts in urban areas, global warming, the privileged accessibility of travel etcetera. The concept of waste also probably needs to go, or at least our pathological avoidance of it's trajectory; knowing that nothing is ever simply flushed down a toilet or dropped off in a desert in a lead vault, cleanly removed from the world of operations which somehow exists over and above it's own refuse. This concept should die, because it's a fiction.
And look where it's gotten us.
More thoughts on old movies I've been rewatching in isolation;
Howl's Moving Castle is more queer than I remembered, the flamboyance of it's main character which as a teen should've been proof enough to me of a queer agenda but which at the time I couldn't see past Miyazaki's painterly sensibilities. Not that I could really call it an agenda, but it's fun to indulge this idea of a conspiracy of queerness underlying mainstream culture (especially cinema and television), which is probably just the love child of cultural post-modernism and queer theory.
But outside the conspicuously dapper figure of Howl just how queer is the film?
If queerness can be cited as fluid otherness, as a mode always against the normative, then perhaps Howl's queerness can best be exemplified in his anti-war stance. Which is actually more of a passive anti-war stance, because it's not that he disagrees with or is preaching against the war fundamentally, only that his interests do not enclose the war and so it is of minimal importance to him. Howl's interests we are told are more vain, and that vanity is in turn pathologized. But why?
If Howl's vanity pits him against war categorically then why is he seen as 'incomplete' until love interest Sophie restores his heart (literally, if you haven't seen the film go watch it now for reference) and he can finally consummate his partial being in a heterosexual union?
Well, Sophie's got her own flaw or erroneous element seeking consummation inside the magic circle of heteronormative coupling. A witch has put a spell on her turning her into an old woman, but also she has terrible self esteem and this is repeatedly offset against Howl's own (pathological?) self-love, a self-love which the film measures as pathological by his indifference to the war and his refusal to lend his magic to the king's military.
Sooooooo, what's the greater good here; Howl's vanity/self-love lifestyle as a sorcerer and romantic adventurer, or the consummation of self-love and self-loathing when Howl and Sophie end up together in the film's climax (during which they accidentally discover the missing prince over whom the war is being fought, effectively ending it)?
Again, the value of these modes is measured against the war and with that in mind the film seems to be saying that though Howl's Don-Juan-escapades and wizard's indulgences neutrally ally him with a pacifist stance, it's in coupling with Sophie and (only very accidentally) ending the war that the greatest good lies.
However, Sophie's deprecating servileness is also presented as the flaw of an indulgent character, even if negatively. So it seems it's not 'vanity' per se which is pathologized, but self-interested behaviours and attributes themselves, a romantic excess of introspection leading away from an engagement with the polity and wider society (especially when the latter is in crisis).
But then why is the effectiveness of political engagement paired so emphatically with a normative coupling? Or perhaps their coupling is not so normative in as much as both Howl and Sophie operate as inherently queer/fluid personas; Howl a shapeshifting sorcerer, Sophie an ageless victim of a witch's curse posing between old and young, maiden and crone.
But more importantly who cares?
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