Cultures of Despair

Emergency Use in the underground club
Originally uploaded by Niveau.

Beneath Caesar's in Brisbane in a November past my phone reminded me of the prevailing 'state of emergency' and my longing for something to be cleared of people and firebombed. Perhaps my Beckett-esque desire is something of a boring one; "Boredom, the desire for happiness at its purest."

Late last year one of the associate professors and I concocted a plan to wage war on this 'state of emergency' from quite different sides. In his Romantic humanism JJ is a great instigator of revelations. In my nonchalant cynicism I'm a great target for revelation. We came up with the most petite of abstracts:

The human condition has been increasingly extended and interpreted by its own metamorphoses, but at what cost? Today we live with a peculiar political horizon where liberal democratic rationalism is complimented by militant fundamentalism, truth is a matter of taking sides, and the very political horizon meant to protect and nurture our societies divides us into minorities and alienates us from each other. We pay the price with our humanity. Necessity is absent from our political cause, what ever that may be. In an age where technological prowess extends the human condition we are conditioned by technology’s lack of purpose or political cause. Progress has left many disaffected, socially dislocated, and idle. Our modernity is our melodrama. The imagining and critique of the human condition by authors, artists, and film auteurs alike show us a being living through cultures of despair in nation-states set to an alarmist state of emergency; set to love but not loving. We are destitute for meaning, so we look toward comforts promising to end the hastening progess and still give us the ‘high’—new conservativism, fundamentalism, human rights—all the while losing the opaque and ineffable humanity that kept us out of the psychoses, able to endure our social bind, actively engaged with our own lives and not standing in reserve.

We found this melodrama of despair surrounding us. Jarhead had just been released, faculty funding had been toyed with, and the wave of marking had just broken.

I doubt these thoughts are especially dangerous. They smack of faux concern for other people. But it is in other people that we recognise value, we need other people to have value for ourselves.