The Aura of Kony Island

 

What is our present? What is the present field of possible experiences? This is not an analytics of truth; it will concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves, and it seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is this: one may opt for a critical philosophy that will present itself as an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or one may opt for a critical thought that will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present…

                                                                        -Michel Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth

At the risk of responding heedlessly, I venture that our present is defined by the humanitarian pleasure principle. We live in an age of drone aesthetics – every grain of geographic space, every gesture of lived reality, every click of pleasurable association records and cites a historicized datum of our contemporary mode of existence. The mediated flow of images flourishes while the world passes away.

Consequently, those who resist or rebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to denounce violence or criticize an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on reason in general. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake…The question is: how are such relations of power rationalized? Asking it is the only way to avoid other institutions, with the same objectives and the same effects, from taking their stead.

-Michel Foucault, Politics and Reason

We sit idly trapped in the muddied trenches of an uncanny valley – a horizon of existence bereft of the eternal gloss of the nation state, the species, religion and republic. The variegated spectrum of forms by which political associations and ethical commitments take place has outstripped the potentiality for the taxonomic nodes to retain their positions as meaningful referents. When politics is reduced down to a distracted display of public affiliation, the capacity for change becomes impotent.

New Media, New Masses?

The Kony 2012 Campaign which has recently gone viral offers a keen case study evincing the means by which the politics of humanitarianism short circuits the perceived necessity of, the capacity to, and the desire for a reflexively engaged ethico-political constitution of the global citizen.

Right now there are more people on Facebook, than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect. And now we see each other, we hear each other…we share what we love and it reminds us what we all have in common… (Kony2012)

The video begins with a self-conscious introduction of its place within the interconnections of a globalized world. There are literally thousands of videos out there which make appeals to ethical causes and which comment on the opportunities for new social movements – why did this one succeed?

It can’ t merely be that more people simply believe in or agree about this cause. It seems to me that it is definitively rooted in the aesthetics of the campaign. Yet it also reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s observation that the aura’s present decay is linked to “the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life” (255).

Benjamin continues in  Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility:

The desire of the present-day masses to “get closer” to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction….The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness from what is unique (255-6).

The introduction’s statement that, “Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect" performs, analyzes and describes the process by which the increasing significance of the masses is linked to the desire to overcome uniqueness. To reproduce the work of art through the youtube film means to merely share it; the work’s reproduction coincides with its consumption. Thus the dynamics of the artwork’s aura have reinvigorated their original ritualistic association.

As Benjamin writes:

The unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value.

 Markers of the viral-ity of the video, the display of the statistics of views, analytics, data etc…express the thoroughness of “the interpenetration of art and science” in the age of technological reproducibility. The ritual is disclosed through the knowledge of the commonality of viewership which simultaneously endows a video with a cult like magic, while depressing any semblance of uniqueness inherent in the act of consumption.

The video then proceeds to show a scene of a person who ‘hears’ for the first time as the result of a cochlear implant. In seeing another person learn to hear, we learn to see hearing differently, and hear different things than were previously possible. The film discloses a world of scenes and gestures contained within our everyday movements that were previously unknown. Film calls for our attention and analysis because it more precisely documents the gestures of the body, through slow motion time is extended, through the juxtaposition of images new associations emerge, through the procession of angles new viewpoints and understandings of positionality are created and so on.

Photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial. This constitutes their hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of reception. Free-floating contemplation is no longer appropriate to them. They unsettle the viewer; he feels challenged to find a particular way to approach them.

Watching the cursor click share leads to an instinctive, mimetic desire to also share the video, perceptions and understandings of the video are changed in the act of consumption itself. 

“The world is changing…the rules of the game have changed…the next 27 minutes are an experiment, but in order for it to work you have to pay attention" (Kony 2012)

“[T]he audience is an examiner, but a distracted one” (Benjamin).

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The Communicative Problematique

What does this blog communicate? It knows not to whom it speaks; sender and receiver dance in an interminable display of uncertainty. The remnant haunts its every move, its every trace, its every waking second of experience. 

The inexhaustible breaths of life-worlds collide and collude in split-second flashes across a screen. The gap, the break, the rupture opens up as words spray from page to page. Experiments in poetry dishes pretend they are persons and persons play each other like fiddles.

What can one communicate? The Attempt at Self-Criticism in The Birth of Tragedy asks if there are not also neuroses of health. The answer to this questions remains in the affirmative just as much, if not more, today as it did for the ancients. The utter profusion of babble and words weave their way into existence in this age of over-consumption, jumping to levels that would stop Pericles dead in his tracks. There are no more noble funeral orations, just sensationalized exhibitions of lives that are no more.

How can thoughts stand out amidst this ever growing mountain of rubble? Klee’s Angelus Novus is up to its neck within our temporal threshold. To gain clarity in an age of technological claustrophobia is like trying to send a terabyte through a landline.

Can creation remain novel, nay sovereign, in an era plagued by the simultaneity of infinite fascination and boredom? I say yes, it may, but only if one has the courage to will it; only if one is born ready to breed new beginnings; only if one can muster a boldness for greatness that renders the present subservient to a more ancient wisdom.

This is the task of our times: to learn how to live again; to learn how to will again, to learn how to love again – in short – to be willing to risk a sort of loving madness in the face of an existential serenity. If one admits this to task to be of utmost significance one will quickly become wanton – where, nay whence can one find the institution providing such an education? Although man lives in a house of mirrors, he very seldom takes the time to reflect himself. 

 Benjamin's Ninth Thesis: 

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Excerpt from: Nietzsche's Attempt at Self-Criticism: 

Where then must tragedy have come from? Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness? And psychologically speaking, what then is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic art grew, the Dionysian madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation, of collapse, of cultural decadence? Are there perhaps—a question for doctors who treat madness—neuroses associated with health? With the youth of a people and with youthfulness? What is revealed in that synthesis of god and goat in the satyr? Out of what personal experience, what impulse, did the Greek have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and original man as a satyr? And so far as the origin of the tragic chorus is concerned, in those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul bubbled over with life, were there perhaps endemic raptures? Visions and hallucinations which entire communities, entire cultural bodies, shared? How’s that? What if it were the case that the Greeks, right in the richness of their youth, had the will for the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was clearly lunacy, to use a saying from Plato, which brought the greatestblessings throughout Greece? And, on the other hand, what if, to turn the issue around, it was precisely during the period of their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more hypocritical, and with a greater lust for logic and rational understanding of the world, as well as “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? What’s this? In spite of all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness, of practical and theoretical utilitarianism, as well as democracy itself, which occurs in the same period, perhaps be a symptom of failing power, of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion, rather than pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist—precisely because he was suffering?—We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions—let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean? . . . 

Kant on the im/possibility of explaining self-reflexivity:

That I am conscious of myself is a thought that already contains a twofold self, the I as subject and the I as object. How might it be possible for the I that I think to be an object (of intuition) for me, one that enables me to distinguish me from myself, is absolutely impossible for me to explain, even though it is an indubitable fact (1804/1983: 73).