[Nettime-nl] The Few and the Many was: Kennis/Tekst/Beeld

[Andreas Jacobs <ajaco@xs4all.nl>]

The Few and the Many



Culture as the social outcome of tensions between the few and the  
many obviously has a firm political component. This component has  
various meanings; one of them is the ability to generate change. This  
changing or generating component can be misused as a repressing tool  
in the hands of power, whether this power is applied to the benefits  
or the destruction of society. Not any human alien order is able to  
protect or to govern individual independence; this is in strong  
contrast with the obligations and promises contemporary governments  
and industries are demanding from ‘their’ citizens and employees.



Being part of an organization, whether a government or any other  
alien body, is conflicting with one’s need to “be” free, not to  
“feel” free, but to “be” free.

The illusion of ‘being’ given by the sensation of feeling is  
paramount and leading to conflicting tensions both in the individual  
and in society



Totalitarian mass-culture establishes a terror state.



This ‘feeling’ of not being, but acting according to the outcome of  
the influences of sensory impulses is in the hands of the malevolent  
an easy way to full fill their purposes.

When the naïve and easily pleased masses are manipulated with sense  
satisfying impulses directed towards the instantaneously consummation  
of their desires, they turn into willing anthropomorphic machines,  
who can easily be controlled. This is exemplified by the enormous  
success of various consumption oriented practises and their  
intentional propagation of a hedonistic lifestyle as everyone can see  
on TV, Film and other media.



It is very difficult not to consume. Emphasize is directed towards  
the notion that to consume is ‘good’, ‘good’ for the market, ‘good’  
for the economics. But fundamentally it is neither good nor bad. It  
is mere an attempt to postpone everyone’s nearing end and as such  
both angst and lust driven.



To be fully aware of the responsibilities one can take for one’s own  
life and independence is the first step towards a freer and less  
manipulative society, which as a matter of fact is getting  
increasingly more difficult when the control and angst/lust driven  
order is gaining more and more control of our individual lives. There  
is a tendency towards de-individuating society in favour of  
socializing the individual.



This results in societies where its members are artificially held in  
a state of angst; fed by their desires which are brutally perverted  
by pornographic conceptions which at their turn are sold as  
entertainment by the culture / creative and knowledge industries.



Both the ancient left and right wings are neglecting lessons learned



Lessons learned from the outcome of the global politico-economical  
status quo after WW II is not being taken seriously enough by the  
world population simply because of a lack of self-consciousness. The  
need to be educated is falsely directed towards knowledge in stead of  
knowing. By objectification of human thoughts mankind loses its  
ground in a more fundamental way than the threads of so called  
fundamentalists.



There is a very diffuse intellectual gap between Europe (continental)  
and the American British alliances which existed before WW II and  
which is still  unresolved.



Ironically the winner of WW II is global fascism, as the bigger  
brother of its more regional guise; National Socialism. America’s  
role in contemporary society can be characterized by a compulsive  
attitude towards its own identity, and in that process neglecting the  
fact that this behaviour is not everyone’s concern and not at all to  
the benefit of the whole. By victimizing the rest of the world it  
merely shows that it is thinking acting and operating driven by an  
enormous frustration.



Education and politico-economical programs are build on false  
premises which do not benefit society as a whole, but on the contrary  
is building a society where one of the most important tasks for its  
citizens is not to end their lives homeless, unemployed, addicted to  
whatever addictions are at hand, doing all this with the very naïve  
assumption that free market will filter the good from the bad.





Globalization in economics promises Heaven and maintains Hell



The wish of the few for a global economical society results in  
constructing political ways to force the many in an angst-lust driven  
society where economical machines easily can reach their goals.  
Culture, ethics, aesthetics, art, compassion are used as  
tranquilizers to keep the few reluctant opponents at ease. The dream  
factory produces 24 hours a day images, sounds, ideologies,  
documents, papers, and novels about how to be happy in a hellish world.



Super economics is a substitute of super ego



As a logical consequence of the mechanism of industrialization of  
knowledge, industries are serving the status quo, and are deforming  
any trend towards a radical departure from the purposefulness and  
makebility of society to a marketing tool serving their own  
intentions namely the complete dehumanization and zombification of  
humankind.

In a world dominated by super economics, superego’s come to the  
foreground to assist the achievement of its program. So we have our  
Bush’s, Blair’s, Saddam’s and Bin Laden’s as a consequence of the  
political direction the world as a whole is taking.



Hedonism is instrumental of fascism.



The natural state of fascism is a state in which all desires are  
fullfilable, instead of rejecting the dependencies of desires as a  
burden and a suffering, by maintaining a more ethical attitude  
towards its seductions, fascism propagates and fully embraces the  
orgies, the bacchanal, the bloodshed, the genocide, the total  
destruction of beauty and is suffocating aesthetics by crossing  
deliberately the line between the domain of the individual and the  
domain of society.





Class struggle ‘follows’ class consciousness



When a minority of workers ‘inside’ the so called creative/ culture  
knowledge industries do have a more critical attitude towards the  
intentions of their employers, they do not want to be employed  
anymore, instead people are starting to work for themselves and  
trying to maintain a more indepent life/work environment, which, as  
an ironical result, leads to a political involvement in this  
attitude, creating an artificial role function, which is gradually  
incorporated into the politico-economical programs of the very same  
ursurpating financial and state machines, adding another refinement  
in the producer-supplier-consumer chain. The ‘Creative Class’ of  
Richard Florida, for example, is heavily read and used as a blue- 
print in developing city economics, at least in the lower  
governmental circles in The Netherlands.



A possible way out will be to break the chain, to be able to produce  
without the economics involved, a nearly unimaginable, utopian  
alternative, to produce works of aesthetical value which are  
fundamental purposeless, not serving any need whatsoever. Developing  
a new aesthetical and ethical consciousness in place of redefining  
cultural and social consciousness will help to separate the  
aesthetical and the artistical from the creative and the social and  
in that process regaining an autonomous position.



The creative class does not exist (yet)



When there is (again) an autonomous position of the aesthetical and  
the artistic the possibility arise to interchange thoughts, means of  
cooperation and the like between the creative and the social, before  
that the former has to separate itself from the submissive role is  
has nowadays.



To be able to play a future role ‘creative class’ consciousness has  
to be developed and not taken to be granted.







Andreas Jacobs, Art Ist

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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