Totalitarian Capitalism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism form the more familiar forms of tyranny known to us as dictatorships. Totalitarianism is a term reserved for Nazism and Bolshevism, as seen under Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Arendt stresses that totalitarianism is not to be confused with fascism, and points out that the Nazis themselves were keen to distinguish Nazism from fascism, and looked down with contempt on Mussolini's fascist Italy. While dictatorships have often been driven by totalitarian movements, once they acquire power they seize the power structure of the state. By the very maneuver with which they seemingly take on complete control they straight-jacket themselves; dictatorships are characterized by a complete takeover by the state, but also a containment within the state. They satisfy themselves with the bureaucratic confines and enter into a state of equilibrium. The totalitarian drive is extinguished. Conventional dictatorships are not unfamiliar, and while they are oppressive and brutal, the Western world has never been adverse to dealing with them. Operating as they do within the state structure they offer a degree of stability and predictability¹.

Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.

Limbic Thinking Extended

Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another¹. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.

Obsessive Materialism in a Virtualising World

An interesting change began to take hold in the tech industry as the iPhone rose to prominence, eventually dominating the landscape and setting the terms for the way we think about communications technology. In truth, it had already begun with the iPod and was part of Apple’s design ethos at least since Steve Jobs returned to the company. This was a focus on the materiality of the device - the device as object: object to behold, object to be held, object to worship.

Reimagining the Green Lantern Corps

With the box-office success of Aquaman, long-gestating projects based on DC properties are sure to be getting a bit of a boost. One such project, a Green Lantern Corps movie, has been in the air but never solidified since the critical and box-office disaster of the 2011 movie starring Ryan Reynolds. However, what I would like to do here is not to propose a set of inane criteria by which Warner Bros. can "do the property right" or pine for a series of doubtless obscure and ultimately juvenile comic pages to come to "life" on the big screen, but instead to formulate a vision by which the formula and indeed the identity of the Green Lantern Corps might be subverted, perverted, and completely reimagined. I want to use the general concepts introduced in the comics as a springboard from which to delve into more interesting themes in greater depth than is offered by the typical superhero comic or blockbuster movie.

Project: Return to 'Return to Sender' Top-Level Image

Previously I posted about the visual development of an image for a small project titled Return to Sender. That post can be found here. Essentially I walked through the various steps I used to make the image (planning, model-making, photography and compositing) and ended with a note that I was somewhat satisfied with the image but considered it not entirely finished. I have since gone back and revised the image, so this post is meant to document those updates.

Warming Up to the Techno-Fix

In a brief but broad discussion in 2015, award-winning science fiction author and literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin decried the absurdity of those who would turn to the techno-fix to combat global climate change (The Nation, 2018). The expression is a common one: technology got us into this mess, now we want to use it to get us out of it?

The trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of simulated realities so future generations can experience them.

Science and Self-Imposed Limits

If science is, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a language that excludes all teleological vocabulary (Bauman, 1989) - a descriptive technique that avoids purpose or will - then it follows that there are limitations to its reasoning that are built into its interpretive framework. These limits manifest at the innermost and outermost scales - the questions concerning the self and the nature of the universe.