Archive 02: Resisting Empire - A Cultural Diffusion
05.08.06Idea Writing: An Archived, Non-Refined Draft
Just something I found while looking through my notes. Just a strange rambleing blurb about resisting empire, cultural diffusions and the like. Sometimes it is a lot easier (and interesting) to write something quickly and with feeling than to really sit dowwn and write a very refined and researched piece. the following is one such example of some improvisational , semi-academic, post-modern type writing.
As one might suggest, The Matrix movies are not about a distant future where mankind is controlled by a global rhizomatic machine; all encompassing, controlling our brains. No!! The matrix is present reality!!
It is a difficult task for us to “wake up” and see the earth we have bred. Our current wars on humanity in the Middle East may be compared to “Zion”, the underground city where humanity still exists. We are controlled! By television, by the movies, by our computers. It has become an impossibility for those of us bound to this indefinitely connected system to relieve ourselves from its grasp. How can self sufficiency exist anymore when we are bought and sold through our eyes. As candy of video games and “product” placements. Our media biz has connected us to a brainwashing mechanism that has obliterated individuality. What we must do now is resist. With everything we have, we must resist.
Resistance has been an extremely difficult task given our globality. It seems that the harder we push the harder the weight pushes back. Terrorism has been a failed path; as a weapon of the weak (Joxe, 2002) it only fuels the anger of the strong, oppressive forces. This therefore echos Chomsky’s argument that we cannot address terrorism of the weak against the powerful without addressing terrorism of the powerful against the weak (Chomsky, 2003). Civil resistance in the form of peace is chaotic at best given the lefts continual disorganizations. The internet as a organizational tool has been extremely effective but only as an “internal” resistant not as an external one that helps to cease expansion. It cant be trusted that reality to be sent to us in an email. “Meet here. Meet there. We are doing great.” It’s so sad that this is false. We are being forced back with ever increasing strength, at every turn, in every media. As for virtuality, by its very nature, offers a product deprived of its substance, offers reality without being so (Zizek, 2002). We choose what to see within it, as we choose what to ignore.
Our first sign of this impending global disaster came with our desire to control and ultimately obliterate nature. Favoring a monoculture that replaces diversity, modern industrial agriculture - requiring fertilizers, poisons, petroleum, steel mills, agricultural universities, polluted waters, dead seas – is a system to fight back environmental life that is constantly in an effort to rebalance itself, to heal its wound (Kotke, 1993). This was no small task for nature is a very powerful enemy. To illustrate this control, horizontal growth must be coupled with vertical growth; resistance to this is to give back to the earth what it has lost, recreate sustainability (Virilio, 2002). In this sense it is our bodies that must be reclaimed. Since the conquest of space our bodies have been lost (Virilio, 2002), now with ever increasing network connections our minds, our psyche is in jeopardy of being dangerously homogenized.
As a combatant, the minimizing of assets and return to the “real” is in the strongest of order. To resist the impending claustrophobia of globalization, a telluric contradiction of distances as Virilio states (Virilio, 2002), is to become horizontal again. To return to the land, the environment, to embrace sustainable living practices, to know and realize where food comes from, where clothes come from, where energy comes from and keep it localize, self contained. This is the form of ultimate resistance to technological, industrial, and capital slavery.
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