Note that I have not mentioned the real-politik of money. What vested interests of cash are in the flow?
Obama is the first United States President to at least begin to bridge the question of the United States as a fantastic mechanism of white European colonial empire. True this machine got away from the control principally of the mother country, the UK. But by and large since the end of the last great war between nation states in 1945 the United States and the UK have followed basically the same intention and direction of purpose.
The world has continually ameliorated its racist stance from the standpoint of the European colonial epoch. Colonies have been artfully deconstructed in some places, while in others they have been toppled by bloody force. Civil Rights Movement in the United States has had the effect of an emerging sense of consciousness about racism inherent in the very fabric of our colonial capitalist system: what has made it so savagely successful has constantly employed the slave-labor of people from "emerging nations," again, those who by the color line have not been assimilated into the European capitalist system. And this system points to the success and far ranging creedence of it's belief. It proves the implicit facticity of it's faith in the consumer items we live with every day: computers, automobiles, and modern architecture.
Nobody knows what will actually happen.
The ethnicity, the unquestioned, unconscious ethnicity of capital is pitted against the ethnicity of Islam. War is bad for everyone involved. It is bad for nation-states that hold these confederations of religious belief together. Such war is "total war" that is owned and defined by the state and reaches it's apotheosis in the atomic bomb. That is part of the dangerous equation of synthesizing capital state-economic-technology with Islam. The desire for revenge on the seemingly mindless and soul-less greed of Capital is without fathom.
Proponents of Kapital simply point to the facticity that this discourse is being delivered on a computer, and is itself interwoven on the system of ecconomics that bring us the world-wide-web of information that springs from the capitalist Bestand, controlling ordering and regulating everything it can come in contact with and assimilate. Information itself has no value. And so those who assert fasiscular value (fundamentalist Christians and Muslims alike) point to the apparent valuelessness of this system as precisely the anathema from which the only exit is in complete renunciation.
But it seems (without casting aspersion on adolescence) part of my own adolescent process that spent time denouncing the soul-less information/consumption/waste production of capital. It's true, but perhaps at this moment one might be tempted to wonder if it is not somehow my own mindless, soul-lessness that somehow projects itself upon such a system. The doctrine of flexibility is enunciated most clearly by the Beatles (who seem in this moment to be working for the American NSA):
"you had better change your mind instead."
Now there is a piece of quietism for you. And while the revolution of the 60's turned the hippies into a bunch of naval gazing neo-conservatives. There is no other alternative?
How far do we work toward changing our minds, like the good girls and boys we have been urged to be through years of introspection and psychoanalysis, and at the same time, how far do we work toward changing the system as well?
Communist China, another nation state, celebrates its 20th anniversary of Tiennanmen Square. There we see the struggle of students against those who, once again in the words of the Beatles, "go round carrying pictures of Chairman Mao." Clearly this is the indictment of a nation that owns an alarming portion of our national debt.
Good psychoanalysis never went about insisting that we quiet our activist tendencies. However it did present an ethical challenge of developing ourselves. It continues to deliver change at an alarmingly belabored rate. It is no less than horrific to think of those individuals who have been "enlightened" by the process of psychoanalysis as being no more than a handful of the wealthy elite. At the same time one always wonders when Hillman and others say "We've had a Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and the World's Getting Worse" that it might be a matter of what catastrophe's we have avoided. This may be very much like the Bush doctrine of police and "homeland security": which says: be thankful for what you do not get. And indeed we can imagine easily that the nightmare of nuclear conflagration might have happened a hundred times over were it not for the work of those who continue to advocate for some form of sanity and civilization.
Capitalism is not entirely closed. There is some faith in the process of those who seek not merely to know some kind of backwards-looking childhood psyche explored by the trauma based therapies of the world (which are promulgated against the impoverished populations of the masses in the United States "ethnic" "minor/minorities."
"Minority" is changing, and minority is no longer that which receives less represntation. It may be that the democratizing myth of the United States stands by this simple rubrick: "no taxation without representation." So now the representation is beginning to grow and turn back the tide of racism slowly. But is it too little too late? The ethnic and social woes of the American getto have not been erased, and in the given ecconomic crisis (yes, we were coming to that) the system of ecconomics is still becoming increasingly unfair: the people are not placated with the maddeningly inefficient system of public mental health. (Indeed even if the participants in the field of public mental health do SEE the problem, they are helpless to produce more than "evidence based practices" to attempt to make a "technological" response: each attempt at healing, which would ammount to no less than the restoration of the dignity of each human being, founders in an attempt to "reduce symptoms." The vision of the plight of the "under-served population" is altogether transparent, but the inertia of the system conspires heavily against those who seek to eliminate the source of the suffering: to replace ignorance with love, care, and civilization, civic consciousness.)
Civilization and its Discontents was written at the end of Freud's life. Psychoanalysis is the last attempt to grasp at human consciousness and render it somehow rational. Or, if not rational, simply liveable. Marxism was the last attempt to render ecconomics rational. Marxism founders on the premises of those who go round carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.
Few Freudians or Jungians are known for creating death camps for tens or hundreds of millions of people. That was not their thing. Rather their thing was inertia. The unconscious itself is a field so vast that it could not hope to be traversed in a single lifetime, or all the lifetimes ever lived. Rather it expands with each generation, becomes increasingly complex, gathers layers of interpretive weight and inertia.
The religious imperative has been to act. One might hope that in the Middle East there can be such a thing as an action of peace. If there is an act of war, then let it be against extremism. That is the common battle cry we now hear, but we still have yet to question to what extent we find ourselves to be some sort of unconscious extremists, living in the unconscious ethnicity of the American Empire in the beginning of the 21st century of the common era does have its advantages. No other time has allowed us to continue to seek and investigate all other times and histories so exhaustively, to compare and to catalogue, to annotate and differentiate. Will there come a time when we have sufficiently annotated and calculated and made conscious, and we will act with brilliance, deference and kindness, in the triumph of our civilization? Or will we be stuck in the perfect lassitude of J Alfred Prufrock, the lassitude of a single question, of whether to add dairy or soy to the taking of toast and tea?
