Babel

Cryptic Clues to Secretive Solutions

PART II:  A Future Fixation

Last week, on one of our record freeze days here in Florida, I sat next to a man at the bus stop—a black older fellow, smoking a short cigar. "This cold weather, boy!—nothing ever like it!" he said cheerily, smoke crawling out of his mouth.

Realizing that I was the only person sitting there and that he must have been talking to me, I looked up a bit, let out a little laugh and continued reading. He went on, "Man, its never been this cold in Florida...ever! Now, I'm something of a historian, and I've read on the Mayas, Nostradamus, and the Bible, and you know what—somethings gonna happen, man—lemme tell you, man...somethings big and bad gonna happen real soon!"

I looked up at him and closed my book (ironically, I was reading The Decameron), and said with an exhale and a shrug "Who knows?" And with that incredulous breath the conversation prodded along—and after some dialogic dances with Nietzsche and a smidgen of eternal reoccurrence, I was on Bus #5 thinking about what Johnny said in Mike Leigh's Naked:

"What is this fucking fixation with the future? Listen, pal, I've got chronic systolic palpitations...and acute fucking neuralgia!"

Indeed: What is this "fucking fixation with the future?"—this "gleeful preoccupation" of ours? What is this whole infatuation with 2012, with Outbreaks, Armageddon, and Life After People? What is the nature of this strange spiritual-scientific beast, this odd breed of hyper-interpretive mysticism and instrumental rationality that makes this End-Culture so ever-present, so 'real,' so delicious as a commodity?

"A 'Gleeful' Preoccupation"

Though I discussed this odd culture (which Naked so brilliantly critiques) in a previous post Cryptic Clues to Secretive Solutions, it deserves some revision and expansion here.

This culture we're dealing with—this "Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, X-Files" culture—is a culture that is hyper-nihilistic despite its over-believing, its belief: truth is its narcotic; interpretation is its addiction; the end, an end, is its only source of meaning. Its obsessed with appearances, with secrets, with crypts and glyphs: finding them, naming them, interpreting them. Its fixation is ironical: it makes the glyph a paradox, both cryptic and meaningful at the same time, meaningfully meaningless, meaninglessly meaningful.

And insecure with unsteady feet, this culture is also obsessed with the legitimacy of the rationality of its pursuits. Armed with science, with knowledge, it grounds its truths—its meaningful meaninglesses and meaningless meaningfuls—in reason via the sensational and ever-present documentary, quite a salient means of truth production and truth maintenance in modernity.

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Below I trace the movements of this odd type of propheteering, this profitable type of media-propheteering which today scientifically accounts for or 'rationally' possibilizes such things as the alleged revelations of the Mayan calendar and the prophecies of the Bible and Nostradamus.

It is by the following processes, I argue, that Apocalypse is today "REVEALED" and sensationally "FORETOLD."

1) First; the excavation: a bit of the past is unearthed—typically a legend, myth, or prophecy from a bygone era when people, it seems, were more noble and wise; when people had an aura apparently worth interpreting and channeling.

2) Next; the interpretation: the excavation—the legend, myth or prophecy—is dissected, analyzed, then naturalized and rationalized; it is disenchanted and given scientific justification.

3) Finally; the prophetic conclusion: an enchantment—a grand prophetic conclusion—is drafted, ironically interpreted from the disenchanted miracle. A new 'miracle,' therefore, is made possible from the 'possiblized' impossible.

With the excavation of the past we see its sentimentalization, its romanticisation. People of yore, it seems, had powers: the Mycenaeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Mayans, they knew, they had foreknowledge—and they left us crypts and clues with the answers to our profound questions (1).

But these clues beg to be disenchanted (2): their talks of God and gods are too superfluous, too flowery, too childish; they need to be tempered by the steady hand of rationality. And when the cryptic data is punched into a computer, analyzed, correlated, regressed, drained of its prophetic truth, it is ready to foretell a Real lucrative enchantment (3): the foreseeable and definite end of the world. Past insecurities have become future secured insecurities.

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On Mayas, Bible Documentaries and Nostradamus

With this new-found 2012 Maya Calendar obsession we see little more than the rekindling of the devils of noble savagery. Just like Freud's Moses could only be honored after his betrayal and murder, the Native American's utility can only found after his annihilation—only then, after he is decimated, can he be understood and interpreted as wise, as Rousseau's magical savage at one with nature, as someone, something, to rectify through our own magical de-alienation. Like Abel, his voice cries out from the ground and like Cain we are marked by it: the Mayan voice of unadulterated special knowledge, of redeeming de-alienating truth cries to redeem us with foreknowledge of 2012; and it is a warning not a curse for Enlightenment understands not damnation. Reason always find a way—the film Armageddon taught us this!

Below are two documentary clips that embody the theses put forth in tripartite preposition. Notice the excavation, the interpretation, the mythical's disenchantment and the conclusion's reenchantment. Notice how we can explain why they're right (they knew the planets, but we've vivisected them!).

And with that we see the mythical disenchanted by reason as a means of making possible another enchantment: the destruction of the world on the arbitrary year 2012. But of course we've seen this before. We've seen enchantments of all sorts scientifically and rationally explained in films like Naked with its 1999 theory, with X-Files over and over again, and of course the infamous Y2K bug crisis.

We see it too in the Bible-Science and Nostradamus documentaries when they empirically account for (or at the very least scientifically possibilize) a range of mythical phenomenon, just to, it seems, dream of their realness, make them once again possible by tying them to secular Swine Flu and Global Warming fears—be they the flood of Noah, the Plagues of Exodus, or seven seals of Revelation. "666! Chernobyl!" Johnny cried! "The end is nigh! The game is up!"

The End is Nigh

Like Johnny, we're all poseur prophets ruled by micro/mono-manias foretelling grand visions of the end of history. We want to be BIBLICAL again. Just like the Jews longed for the Freudian Moses they killed, so do we, perhaps, long for the God for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary. It is that that God figure, after all, that impossible Real father, we now halfheartedly transcribe into our now celebrated friend-foes, the Natives, the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the dead noble savages from who we draw a tepid environmentalist ideology and 2012 insecurities.

Like Adorno and Horkheimer argued years ago: Enlightenment is becoming myth. Perhaps, in the end, that is the most tempting claim to make, that 'myth is not dead, it has only been reunderstood, that mythic text has been replaced by Enlightened complexities and Enlightened complexities are now becoming mythic text.' In the end, the kitsch documentary-prophecies, the modern foretelling of man's last hour, all seem to be examples of this process, and examples too of an age old phenomenon: the cheap commodification of the End.

In the next and last post of this series I aim to discuss another phenomenon that seems to work by processes laid out here: the intricate (and ever-expanding) 9/11 and Zeitgiest conspiracy theory culture