The destructive character, according to Benjamin, has no need for solitude, instead, he is desirous of one thing, witnesses. He does not fear being misunderstood, or to die, you see, his destruction by himself is immanent. What then, does it mean, when we no longer have to be alone under any circumstances? When your most histrionic and hostile moments are captured publicly, and when your destruction (mediated as it is, through a screen) can be given the most eyes possible for its viewership? The destructive man no longer has to occupy the realm of the oracle, spitting incoherencies to drive war, instead, he is given the gift of social media. A tool to spread his babbling, his fear mongering, and encouraging the chaos. It may be that even the best of the destructive icons of old, those who were mythologized into something they never were (gone is Gengis Khan who built an empire, surely an act which required the depth of thought only solitude brings), and present is the destroyer (the most racist mythologies of Khan survive, the virile destroyer, the absolute sublime).
Social media has created a world with more false connections and contradictions than ever before, and the goal of it, in spite of what you are told, is not to breed connection, but dissent. Isolated and aggravated individuals waging thousands of petty skirmishes at all moments, the vast majority of them intra-class, and driven by the enemy class. We have become docile, subservient and willing, the liberal free speech concept has been absolutized. Twitter and facebook algorithms drive us increasingly to niche communities of individuals, surrounding, birthing, and killing leaders, all of whom lack the skills which a real leader commands. They no longer need for an individual to be able to teach, guide, and control chaotic scenarios, all that is required is that the voice of leadership is as shrill and mocking as possible. Even the most driven leadership on social media is quickly either co-opted via misinformation campaigns, or destroyed in much the same way.It is why it is so often necessary to mention that I am by no means a theoretician, but merely someone commenting on observations. I am intimately acquainted with humanity, again, because of my labor.
The concept that I put forth in my last blog post, that we are connected at, not our most social, because the social-moment is mediated, as is the political-moment, and the labor-moment. We must reconstitute these, but to do so will require a serious risk to ourselves. You see, the histrionic man is the logical continuation of the destructive man. Where the destructive man was unconcerned about misunderstanding, the histrionic man doesn’t just welcome it, he encourages it. The histrionic man is no longer a laborer, or even really a person. They are converted into something more base, the histrionic man is raw material. He is proud of this fact, “producing content for the algorithm” is the ironic joke that he tells, not realizing that within this ironic distance is not just the space where real ideology is functioning, but also, the space where that ideology is weaponized.
The histrionics that this man encourages become viral,(i hate this fucking term) an interesting condition considering the current state of affairs, as the world goes into uproar over the same thing. In this sense, viral doesn’t denote a medical condition, it’s not, it’s quite simply a psycho-social phenomenon, an infection which poisons, not just the brain, but the socius as a whole. Every person you meet, you, and yes, me included have been effected to some degree by this histrionic social mediation. Gone is the concept of level headed discourse, and we see it in the rolling back of civil liberties in present times.
Previously it took a real manufactured crisis to roll back civil liberties, real lives were cost to enforce the PATRIOT act, real human lives sacrificed to capital like some kind of god. This time, a bioweapon, manufactured spectacle, and by comparison with many epidemics, a low death toll. This is not to say to not mourn those lives, but the current fear mongering being done does not tell the full story.
In the midst of national panic, the public coffers were raided, the state quarantined neighborhoods, and an aggressive attack on local business for the benefit of the haute-capitalists was enacted. Starve, children, lest you die of the disease, is their rallying cry. Even the best case scenarios at this point involve a normalization. States have shown they can engage in “lockdown” (whatever that means), revoke habeas corpus, revoke right to assembly, revoke the right to privacy to enforce medical testing. It is, uncoincidental that liberalism gave you the absolutization of one freedom to strip away all other . Speech. Even as you speak constantly, incessantly on social media, you say less and connect more rarely. Your speech is given to the market place of ideas, and treated as having the same value as all others. Thus, the only value of the speech on social media comes from one place, metrics.
The algorithm screams for engagement, to learn, to map the social, and discover the numerics that allow it to create a snapshot of individuals. You see, if they know what you act like under different emotional states, they can then figure out how to get you there. So, if they know how to panic the populace, and that panicked people do not behave rationally, only one thing remains. To make as many people as scared as possible, to roll back your civil rights, to buy up all the land around you, and to have you say thank you as they do it, that, was always the goal of creating the histrionic man.
It is worth mentioning here, that the histrionic man is not necessarily a guilty party but a victimized party. They are the victim of screen damage, of the common social illness which is a leftover, the destructive man driven to his absolute final moment. He no longer needs to leave his social sphere to engage in destruction, instead, his howling can be done from inside the comfort of his own home. His distance, literal and ironic, from his own experiences become defined by this very same distance. His destruction becomes impotent, unable to parse the real world from the fake. You see, Hegel, and by extension Marx, informed us clearly that destruction of things is immanent in their birth, for in birth and death, the synthesis is becoming. The destructive man, now turned the histrionic man is incapable of all of this.
He serves as a representation, a signifier of himself, little more than, as is the common refrain on social media, a brand. He is left in liminality, neither existing nor dead, neither subsumed to himself, or willing to be subsumed fully into the anti-social space of social media. Here, we’ll call it anti-social because it represents something which is more than a-social, it’s not just the rejection of socializing but instead, the active contradiction of it. It may not be intentional, and I’ll go so far as to say that most often it isn’t intentional but caused by an increasingly commodified socius.
The current crisis is an exclamation of the histrionic man, it is his rallying cry, his joy, and his default mode. Gone is the need for a physical witness to his power. His screen mediated destruction and chaos is glorified in isolation that isn’t. Still never in solitude the histrionic man can move past the need for such simple things as human interaction, instead using, much like himself, a symbolic-commodity social media. His fascism will not be that of the 1940s but instead one mediated by thousands upon thousands of circuit breakers, and internet interactions. One of symbolic crises, the realization of the 9/11 dream written down in the PATRIOT act, our enemies have shown their hand at all times, and laid their traps, not in secret but in broad daylight, and because we saw them set we assumed we had avoided them, in reality, the traps were misdirection because they had us building our own cages the whole time, thinking we were boxing in the traps and keeping us outside of it.
The histrionic mans fascism will be begged for by the petit-bourgeois, and it will be given to a working class that has convinced itself that it is already free and can’t be trapped. The screen-damaged will hide it in fancy rhetoric, the quarantines and lockdown will leave us isolated, alone, and unable to strike back, and as the histrionic man hides history he will leave us saying, “ubi sunt?”
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