ReduxMatters

This is the opening salvo in defense of the very nearly lost great art of thinking.  Between the “good,” indolent need to believe anything and the myopic arrogance to doubt everything lay the new, fundamentally monastic, dull-eyed voyeurs.  Quite literally, their eyes are more akin to the catatonic, Chinese-made Anglo dolls with grim smiles peddled at the local Wal-Mart at low, low prices than real, vibrant animate eyes.  These voyeurs-- maybe even you--pose the clear and present danger to all true investigation, curiosity, and aesthetics.  The voyeurs watch, scan, scroll, and secure almost know-thing for themselves—no seizure, no earning, no struggle, in short, no material reality at all.  Their existence is a false and vapid cocoon maintained by unthinking, nurtured by unthinking, rewarded by self-congratulation.

Hence, their new monasteries are singular, insular, and dangerously alienating, connected only by ones, zeroes and the monotone droning hum of white noise.  Go on, listen really carefully.  I wager you can hear it now louder than you might like to admit.  Admittedly, it is a dastardly and needful thing that I do even this moment.  It is exactly this perverse and deeply ironic disconnection from the sensual that makes the voyeuristic information zealots so exceedingly recalcitrant and nearly impossible to engage in honest argument.  For they have so totally and completely framed themselves as being informed, “plugged-in” and beyond reproach that, truly, on blind faith alone, they ABSOLUTELY BELIEVE in their stunted frame.  [I should make clear that this framing takes place within a broader regime of banality that loudly applauds them for this exact framing.]  In this respect, an unnatural religion has been created, forged if you will, like all sadistic, absolute religions across time.  All religions wound, often industriously, always without apology.

And here is where this opening salvo, without ricochet, hits the mark.  The modern voyeurs, like all prodigious watchers, tend to most often miss what is just before their nose as they transfix on the given fetish at a point certain in the visual field.  In the modern dilemma, this overlooking is insidious and disturbing because what they transfix upon is the screen, either little or big, in their hand or on their bed, eighteen to twenty inches (do the measurement right now) in front of their face.  What they are missing is the FACT that data and information, pasted on a screen, is not KNOWLEDGE.

The mass confusion and consequent delusion, produced by the mis or mal identification of data and information for knowledge has now so diseased our politics, art, and community that direct action is necessary, redux matters, and the time is now, if ever.  The offensive, but sadly also reactionary, stimulant I have in mind, is thinking.