Notes on the worldfuck

And now for ... some of the larger features of my ongoing essay.

LI took the paragraphs below from a post we did in March. It is one of my good posts – we mean it, man. (and there’s no future … in England’s… dreaming). There is a pleasing and systematic dovetailing of notions , here, as those who read LI with the religious fervor of the early martyrs of the Church will surely notice: to describe the development of that total social phenomenon, the triumph of happiness as a norm, is to trace one songline in a map that shows how the total system – the industrial system, the epiphenomenal ideologies, and the war culture – came together in one gigantic worldfuck. Let others worry about world lines and world view – us sentries on the borderline between the present and the Last Things are permanently worried about the worldfuck.

So here is what I wrote in March:

Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.”

Maybe in my next post I will get to the proto-industrialization of the European countryside. Wouldn’t that be a treat!