THE STARS LOOK DOWN WITH SHAME
Notes from the Nest - 1
Origin. To those of us who live in more suburban places where light pollution is not so much of a dire concern, a step outside is often more than enough to provide a good view of the stars above. I would thoroughly recommend doing it whenever you get the chance. In fact, the further removed you can be from a city, the better. The veil of a dark night sky suspends seemingly stringless cosmic light and, holding it there, presents an almost perfect frame.
Seeing this, I am torn between recollections of Hume and Merleau-Ponty, each dealing with a certain perspective on the role of space and background in defining and presenting image-dimensions to our human eyes, filling our experiential being with content both immediate and mediate, subtle and direct. These were, for them, the defining structures of our very existence, the reason as to why we see, view, condense, think, and behave the way we do. But today - well, who gives a shit?
A few moments spent in this position - sitting down, looking up - is more than sufficient to lead me through one of two paths: that, firstly, it is not so difficult to understand why cosmological thinking was called into existence, and that, secondly, the stars must look down in shame. On this latter end, rather than seeing an existence collectively sitting down and looking up, they must surely see a bundle of numbers with heads down and asses up.
Edgy, I know. But bear with me for the point.
Personification. The idea of personifying things, or imbuing them with a sense of collateral purpose such that they mirror, in perfect resonance, our own ideas and thought processes as such, is not entirely new to human behaviour. If in doubt, consider the average dog-owner who, in becoming frustrated with a lack of response or obedience, will either elaborate commands in lengthier ways or restrict them entirely to much shorter plateaus: “Why do you feel the need to do this?” - as though one is bollocking a colleague - is interchangeable with “Stop. Get over here. Sit.” - as though one is disappointed with a small child.
Hearing this process take place seems to call to mind the behaviouralist psychological fantasy of the previous century: that tones, gestures, speed of articulation, response-reward mechanisms, and so forth, bristle with the conditions both necessary and sufficient to properly ordain desirable behaviour - or is it just me that is reminded in such a way? The point is that we seem to have arrogated to ourselves the manifest destiny of ordering desirable behaviour through a series of ploys which, when default, amount to little more than an attempt to contain the dynamism of life itself into a pattern of rewards, responses, and purposes.
Is this not little more than an anthropomorphisation of life? We do it with pets, but likewise did the cosmologists do it with stars - albeit in a roundabout way. For example, to the Aristotelian worldview, the sub- and supra-lunar regions corresponded to a binary: the former of decay and death, the latter of the eternal infinite. The stars in this view are enlivened with divine intent, and their circuitous regularity as the opposite to the midday sun is proof of concept that dependability rests only with the cosmic divine.
To be clear, I am not saying that humans should not seek order in anything. I am not advocating for schizophrenia en masse. Quite the opposite. The problem to which I am pointing is precisely a question of which order it is we seek.
They look down with shame. I will not for the time being deal with the nature of aperspectival concepts. That is a matter best reserved for discourse on technology. For now, I will admit that I am working from a thoroughly perspectival “bias” (if it might be called that legitimately). For now, I am writing from the position of a being who can in fact sit down and look up at the stars.
And they do look down with shame.
Could we have betrayed something without feelings? Quite possibly. But more than that: we have betrayed the global generations before us who, looking up at the same stars, were nowhere quite so undignified as we are today. We pretend, for example, that the practice of slavery is universally abolished. Is it? Last I knew, it’s ongoing, and in the most blatant, crude, and obviously violent form imaginable. While this is not to pretend that hardships and actions rightly arousing disgust have never occurred before our time, it is to say that they are far from abolished; this is something that no amount of ignorance, willed or not, will erase. It is a particularly Western comfort to ignore the fact that the banks upon which we depend, which do us favours in granting mortgages to those who play the game long enough, are frequently embroiled in some disaster impacting some community or another at the margins of the capitalist octoped - for example.
But there is another, subtler type of violence occurring atop the crudest forms. It is perpetuated in dimensions entirely different to the examples given above. However, it is still there. I am reminded of Byung-Chul Han’s work in Psychopolitics - in many ways a great successor to Foucault and Deleuze. Being honest, I felt that the conclusion could have been further-reaching. Yet this does little to change the fact of the matter that the most perfect form of tyranny is that which is continued, uninterrupted, precisely on account of its not being noticed.
Turned inside out, denied interiority, removed from familiarity: connection to the device entails disconnection, to varying degrees, of one’s context. Arguing about the possible alterity - can’t one be both? - is useless here. Of course one can be both connected and disconnected simultaneously. The classic example of this is the case of only having two hands to work with at any one time when confronted with a prevalence of tasks.
What I am saying is that the process of this simultaneity isn’t some conclusive push to a transcendental otherly domain. It is as black-and-white as: removal from immediacy leans upon mediacy leans upon dependency leans upon Who, what, when, where, why, how?
Beginning at the latter, it is possible to work backwards to build a sequent defining precisely in what way and by what means emotionally-charged capitalism is rendered possible. It is only by exploiting cognitive structures of intent, the means of emotional directedness, that profit-maximisation may inform the nature of a product’s placement and the lifestyle it advertises, which in turn diffuses the psyche to expect a certain lifestyle criteria to be met - happiness, for example - which in turn charges the mediation by self-sustaining paragons of detachment and depersonalisation that affect the increasing removal from immediacy.
More products, more consumption, more wastage, more problems. Repetition is the mother of success. Meanwhile, the stars, hovering above in their circadian dependability, look down and see the creature of “head down, ass up”. I don’t care about how many stars are in the sky, but about how many times celestial fireballs must embarrass the race of animal, the human, which is supposedly “top of the food chain”.
If this placement, this being-on-top, means such a radical disconnect not only from the world but equally, and perhaps more vigorously, from ourselves and our own limits - is the price worth paying? Even the stars embody an egoism that isn’t so dysfunctional as to utterly annihilate the very conditions of their own wellbeing. The more we destroy the earth upon which we live (and attempt to cope with that fact by seeking habitability on some other planet), the more this becomes apparent.
Again, though: who gives a shit?