Resorting to Resources

When nature becomes no more than a stockpile of natural resources, people become no more than a stockpile of human resources. Mother Earth and Father Sky part ways, divinity flees elsewhere, and mortals are replaced by fleshy robots. Things become mere rubbish, actual or potential; and no world without end remains, having been replaced by an endless warehouse where only vacuity reigns.

I well remember when the “Personnel Department” at the university where I spent forty-two years on the faculty became instead “Human Resources.” No one made so much as a murmur. After all, at our place of employment — a telling expression, place of employment: the place where we are used as our user sees fit! — we had all long before become no more than reserves to be exploited as the needs of the system dictated. Resources have no voice. To have a voice requires that one be a person, a living, breathing human being. So far as our employer was concerned, we were no such beings. We were no more than one kind of resource. So why bother to say anything?

Now that I’m retired from my job at that employer’s place, I have been given back my voice, as it were. I hereby use that voice to protest the reduction of personnel to no more than human resources. 

In the same breath where breathes that protest against degrading people to mere human resources, I also protest the corresponding degradation of Earth to no more than the third planet from the sun, just another store of resources to be exploited until they have been exhausted — at which point we can go with Elon Musk to Mars to exploit that fourth planet in turn.  I protest such endless exploitation of the soil, wherever we may still find some. 

Human resources: Ford assembly line in Detroit, 1913

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[W]e have to consider whether land is just another commercial commodity, or something which we can hold but over which we cannot claim rights or ownership. [. . .] Put another way, is land simply a material substance definable by geographic boundaries, such as a building lot, a ‘natural resource’ waiting for human exploitation like Amazon forest or Alberta tar sands? Or can we think of land as Mother Earth, Pachamama? What can we say of rights to land if she is respected as our mother?

                                    — Brewster Kneen, The Tyranny of Rights

In a couple of lines of his poem “The Death of the Hired Hand,” which takes the form of a dialogue between two friends about a recently dead third, Robert Frost gives what have become two famous definitions of “home.” First, one of the two says: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to let you in.” Then the other replies: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Perhaps the two definitions can be combined into one, shorter than either of them: “Home is the place you belong.”

However, it is easy to lose our way and go wandering in the wilderness, no longer able to find our way back home. Resorting to resources, whether “natural” or “human,” is losing our way. What is more, in that very lostness and wandering, and altogether independent of any conscious intentions on our part, we actually end up trashing our home, the place we truly belong. We end up treating home as though it were just a place we can make use of as we see fit, a sterile storehouse of material just waiting around for us to employ as we wish (maybe to procure ourselves a bunch of Mercedes Benzes we can use to pollute the air globally, or Teslas to help Musk exploit Mars).

Earth is home. It is where we all — each and every one of us without any exceptions — belong. Too bad we as a whole are so ignorant of that. 

Our ignorance is willful, since it serves our purposes as we have come to find formulated for us those purposes, in our blindness to what is. It helps us go after what we think we want, but which fails to bring us any lasting satisfaction once we attain it. (“Is that all there is?” we ask ourselves.)

We, in our willful ignorance, which is to say our utter stupidity, can no longer even see the forests of our home. We have busied ourselves with using up all such “natural resources,” of course, so that most of the great forests are no more. However, before such deforestation had even begun to pick up speed, we were blind to earth’s rich forests. We went blind just as soon as we first began to relate to those forests as resources at all, rather than as places through which we might wander, risk getting lost, or even take up residence. When forests first ceased to be for us bright darknesses and invitingly mysterious places of awe and wonder and became instead no more than resources to be harvested and used up, we were blinded and struck stupid. As they became just another natural resource, we became no more than human resources.     

That is the cost of resorting to resources.

Natural resource: coal strip mining in Wyoming

Escape and Entertainment

[M]aking films is an extraordinarily expensive pastime. At present we therefore have a situation in which the cinema-goer is at liberty to choose the director who happens to be on his wavelength, while the director is not entitled to declare frankly that he has no interest in that section of the cinema-going public that uses films as entertainment and as an escape from the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life. 

                                                                       — Andrey Tarkovsky 

The title of today’s post, “Escape and Entertainment,” can be taken in two significantly different ways. The difference at issue hinges on how the first word, escape, is understood. In his lines above, the great 20th Century Russian master of cinema Andrey Tarkovsky uses that first word of my title in one common way, that way in which it points in the same direction as does the second word, entertainment. By that understanding and that common usage, what one seeks in “entertainment” is precisely escape. 

Escape from what? 

From all the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life, just as Tarkovsky says. 

Entertainment by what? 

By amusements that divert one from the same sorrows, cares and deprivations of the same everyday life.

Is it any wonder that Tarkovsky has no interest in those who relate to works of art such as his own films as no more than means of such entertainment and escape? Even and especially, I will add, when what they seek to escape is care and concern for such a thing as the current Covid plague, to turn to art for such relief from everyday life itself is nothing but a degradation of all art and all artists. 

May all artists always protest, as loudly as possible, such unconscionable degradation of themselves and their art! And may none of their works ever appeal to such escapist desires for mere entertainment! 

Monument to Andrey Tarkovsky  

Outside Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography

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Creating art is a radical act of resistance, one that illuminates fragmentations and allows us as witnesses to attend to our collective wounds and transfigure them. 

                                                                        — Cellista  

 There is, however, a second way of hearing the title of this post, “Escape and Entertainment.” That is a way rooted in the roots of those two words themselves. In its roots, to escape means to free oneself from confinement — to elude one’s enemies by leaving them nothing but one’s empty cape in their hands when they reach out and try to grasp one. As for entertain, by its derivation that word means to hold (from Latin tenere) amidst or in the midst of (French entre- from Latin inter-). Heard to such roots, it is not entertainment that allows us to escape so much as it is the reverse: escape from the clutches of what would divert us from where we belong allows us to retain (once again, from Latin tenere, prefixed by re- used here in its intensifying sense) our proper human place. 

The task of art is not to divert us from life, but to call us into it, to enmesh us ever more deeply in everyday life. Art performs that task most clearly not when it deals with unusual events--or at least events which we wish were less usual than they all too often are, such events as lynchings or mass murders with assault weapons. Rather, art performs its task most admirably, most remarkably, precisely when it gives us to see how extraordinary the most ordinary thing truly is — the incredible beauty of a glint of light off a pair of worn shoes, for instance, or the tinsels of ice dripping off all the trees in an ice-storm. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the closing lines of one of her well-known poems, about which I have written before:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

The task of art is to give us such eyes to see. 

            As I said in my own opening line for this section of today’s post, it is not art’s task to divert us from everyday life, but rather to enmesh us ever more deeply within that life. To say the same thing differently: the task of art is precisely to allow us to escape from all diversions from everyday life, and to embed us through ever more entertainment in that very life.  

That is what art is for! 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Generation of the Homeless

Instead of an economy that satisfies needs, ours is an economy that inflames desires. 

                                                                             — Abdullah Öcalan

What generates homelessness? Our economy does.

That is so, at least, at one level of analysis: our current economy is the “proximate cause,” the nearest or closest factor that generates homelessness. At a deeper level of analysis, however, the “ultimate cause,” the most deeply rooted factor that generates homelessness, is the entire technological system to which the present global economy belongs, along with all modern social forms as well as all of what passes for politics within that same underlying system. 

Especially through its economic component, the global technological system not only sows and cultivates homelessness, but also effectively masks that it is doing so. The dominant means of such masking is the generation of a segment of the population that is reduced to homelessness in a more glaring way than is the rest of the same population. 

Such a mechanism for hiding the homelessness that the system visits upon all human beings without exception, hiding it by making the homelessness of a relative few egregious, is of the same sort as that operative in racism as the mechanism that distracts the majority of those oppressed within the global system by propelling that majority to consider itself superior to one minority or another, which is thrust even lower down the social-economic-political scale. In the case of the United States, that most-despised minority in relation to which the larger mass of the oppressed are systematically encouraged to feel superior consists of African Americans. Elsewhere, that role is played by other minorities — or even by majorities, in places where the system has granted a minority of the population dominance over the majority, as is quite common in places that fall prey to plunder by the various forms of imperialism.    

*     *     *

Should that be so, then would not human homelessness consist in this, that the genuine need for a dwelling is not yet experienced as the need? But what if humanity was already aware of such homelessness? In that case it would already no longer be a misery. It is, rightly considered, the only sustainable demand that calls mortals along the way into dwelling. 

                                                                          — Martin Heidegger 

Perhaps what Heidegger suggests in the lines above is the final, underlying meaning that arises from all human homelessness: the call to humanity to awaken to the one and only truly, definitely human need, the need for home. 

If so, then what is most needful for that very need itself to be acknowledged is the radicalization of homelessness itself, until it becomes no longer possible not to recognize the homelessness, everywhere and at all times, into which we have all been cast. 

The exponential growth of migrant masses circling the globe in flight from destruction, whether those masses flow north from the southern hemisphere, or west from Asia, most especially Asia’s southwestern part (what we call “the Middle East”), or merely accumulate as consumer capitalism produces ever greater numbers of those without shelter in “advanced industrial countries” such as the United States, would then be no more and no less than a shatteringly loud wake-up call to all humans, calling them all without exception — even Elon Musk on Mars, should he ever make it there — to awaken to their humanity.

Mentioning Elon Musk, he and others of his ilk, such as Bill Gates and many more among the super-rich, often make much of doling out some of their riches to those “less fortunate” than they. That is, they make much of all their contributions to “charity.” 

However, that word charity (from Latin caritas) originally just meant “love,” as when Christianity’s Saint Paul writes in one of his letters that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13 NRSV). In that passage, Paul is not recommending that followers of Jesus go out and make great monetary fortunes for themselves, like Musk and Gates, so that they can then turn around and throw cash donations, however large, back down to those they have climbed above in the competition to accumulate the financial capital that passes for wealth in our society today. Rather, Paul is enjoining us all to love one another. That’s all. 

In order to help us heed that Pauline call, we would do well to listen to the words of another early Christian text where we are told, “We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19 NRSV). Nor does it matter in the least just who or what, if anything, we take that “He” to be — including a She (transgendered or not), an It, William Blake’s Great Nobodaddy, or the yawning gap (chaos in the etymologically original sense) that, in opening, makes room for whatever comes forth to come forth. All that matters is to experience being loved — an experience, indeed, the only one, that first frees us to travel along the road of loving others as we are loved. Love just spreads itself that way. 

It is only by going along that way of loving because we have been loved, that, in the very going, we can build together a common human dwelling place, a common home. What is more, it is only by going along that way together that we can truly be awakened to our bottomless need for just such a home.       

Nobody special, just another homeless person to go along with all the rest of us

ENDNOTES 

This is the first in what I expect to be a series of interrelated posts addressing various aspects of the issue of homelessness in modern global civilization. 

The epigraph with which I begin this post is from Öcalan’s Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings — Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume II (Cologne, Germany: International Initiative Edition, 2017), p. 39 (with one slight modification: for clarity of reference, I substituted “ours” for “it” in the phrase “. . . it is an economy . . .”).

The epigraph at the start of the second and final section of this post is my translation of a paragraph from the first version (delivered in August 1951) of Heidegger’s lecture “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in Vorträge. Teil 2—Gesamtausgabe 80.2 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), p. 1089. 

Refusing to Become Subjects

NOTE TO MY READERS: THIS WILL BE MY LAST POST OF 2020. PLEASE LOOK FOR MORE POSTS BEGINNING IN JANUARY 2021.

Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations.

                                                                 —Hito Steyerl[i]

Hito Steyerl

Now that the 2020 Presidential election is over, we might well ask to what extent voting in such a process makes one “a subject of history” in whom “the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” is fulfilled — to use the same terms Hito Steyerl, a German documentary filmmaker, philosopher, and professor of  New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Art, does in the lines above. Or is becoming such a subject even in that agentive sense finally a matter of being subjected to some sovereign, as she goes on to suggest in her remark that “[t]he subject is always already subjected”? That is, is becoming a subject even in the sense of becoming an active agent always already at bottom the very process of being cast beneath someone or something who or which exercises sovereignty over that one or that thing, as fits the etymology of the very word subject (from Latin sub-, “beneath, under,” plus iacere, “to throw or cast”).    

 If, in voting, we are being subjected to becoming subjects, just who or what is doing the subjecting, the casting down beneath? Who or what is really in charge here, where we are all so subjected? Who or what is really the sovereign authority commanding us to vote, constantly threatening us with losing “autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” if we don’t? 

Sovereign over us today is no person or body of persons. Rather, it is the system itself, the very system that masks itself behind the image of “representational democracy.” 

*     *     *

Jean Baudrillard

Our relationship to this system is an insoluble "double-bind" — exactly that of children in their relationship to the demands of the adult world. They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyper-conformity, total dependence, passivity idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other.

                                                         — Jean Baudrillard[ii]

Children need to be left alone just to be children. They should not be forced to become subjects-objects. When adults experience any temptation to objectify children and/or force them to become subjects, those adults need to be careful not to yield to that temptation. They need to access the child that remains buried in any adult, and let that child activate rebellion against any such tendencies. 

That is never easy for adults to do, especially today, after centuries now of adults having been forced to be subjects, and therefore also objects, ever since they were themselves children. It always involves resisting heavy pressure to assume the role of subjects that has been forced upon them, and the role of objects that is inseparably bound to that of subjects. To take off such costumes after decades of wearing them is like taking off one’s skin. Indeed, such once-worn and never-till-now-even-once-removed outfits have become just that: a second skin. 

Stripping such hide off oneself and then keeping it off is, however, the only way to true liberation for anyone. As Spinoza famously said: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

We must make that difficult effort, for the sake of all children, both those within us and those who are other than us. To help us along our way, we can take heart if we attend to what Baudrillard has to say in the remainder of the passage I quoted at the beginning of this section of this post:

Subject resistance is today given a unilateral value and considered to be positive — in the same way as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, of emancipation, of expression, of self-constitution as a political subject are considered worthwhile and subversive. This is [to] take no account of the equal and probably superior impact of all the practices of the object, the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning — exactly the practices of the mass — which we bury with the disdainful terms alienation and passivity. The liberating practices correspond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects; but they do not correspond at all to the other demand to constitute ourselves as subjects, to liberate, to express ourselves at any price, to vote, to produce, to decide, to speak, to participate, to play the game: blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, probably more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is to demand the liberating rights of the subject. But this seems rather to reflect an earlier phase of the system; and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer a strategic territory; the present argument of the system is to maximize speech, to maximize the production of meaning, of participation. And so the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and the refusal of speech, of the hyper-conformist stimulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is another form of refusal by over-acceptance. It is the actual strategy of the masses. This strategy does not exclude the other, but is the winning one today, because it is the most adapted to the present phase of the system.

            We might also, altogether unexpectedly, take heart from the example of all the corpses that the Nazis—not the present-day ones who have crawled out of their holes recently in the United States and elsewhere, but the original, German ones from the middle of the preceding century—heaped up. This passage from a French prisoner-of-war who survived the Nazi camp-system suggests so, at any rate:

There are moments when you could kill yourself just in order that the SS fetch against this limit as it confronts the impassive object you’d have become, the dead body that has turned its back on them, that doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man will at once be stronger than they are, just as trees and clouds and cows, which we call things and incessantly envy. The SS undertaking is careful not to get to the point of denying the daisies growing in the fields. And like the dead man, the daisy doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man no longer offers them a handle. Let them savage his face, let them hack his body to bits, the dead man’s very impassiveness, his complete inertness, will counter all the blows they strike at him.

                                                                      —Robert Antelme[iii]

May we all be like the daisies growing in the fields! May none of us give a shit about their law!

Robert Antelme

[i] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux, no. 15 (2010). Available online at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/

[ii] Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” translated by Marie Maclean, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Standfor: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 218-219.

[iii] Robert Antelme, The Human Race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Illinois: The Marlborough Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 93-94.