under the banner of "crisis": citizenry or the consumerist logos?

For a society that champions its Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a paramount declaration of shared values, principles and prerogatives, it is problematic that the rights of its consumers seem to garner greater value than the freedoms of its citizens. In the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the word “freedom” correlates to matters of the mind, namely – freedom of conscience, of religion, of thought, belief, expression, communication, peaceful assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. These are the foundational components of a participatory democracy which, according to Ivan Illich (1978: 3), is beginning to erode under the forces of unchecked, accelerating technologic expansion. Writing from over a quarter of a century ago, Ivan Illich voiced concerns about a capitalist consumer culture that was losing faith in the “political power of the feet and of the tongue” (9). The result of this, he worried, would be a topsy-turvy technocracy, in which the individual “wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it” (10).

Illich’s prophetic concerns, articulated in his article “Energy and Equity,” are premised on a thesis of velocity and acceleration, a thesis which is more relevant today than it was a quarter of a century ago. “High speed,” he asserts, “is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive” (6). Illich’s elaboration of this claim is as articulate as it is expansive, and while I cannot offer a comprehensive summary of it here, I hope to apply my own interpretation to his theory.

Whereas Illich commits his thesis of speed to the context of traffic, I am interested in understanding how the implications of his discussion are relevant to an entire rationale that dictates the way we have come to understand and correlate notions related to “progress.” Words like “rationality,” “progress” and “growth” have not only become unmoored from their historic reference to general prosperity, the common good, and the common wealth, but have become synonymous in a problematic process of semantic and ideologic dissolution, the implications of which are dire and worth expounding.

I would like to explore these implications by making a drastic cross-disciplinary leap. By situating the process of terminological dissolution within the narrative context of classical and comparative literature, the relationship between dissolution and crisis can be seen as profoundly causal. Consider, for example, the tragic hero, Hamlet. His is a world where the boundaries that separate those fundamental differences upon which values, morals, and social and political systems are precariously but profoundly dependent have been rapidly corrupted, blurred and abandoned. Take for example the murder of Hamlet’s father by his own brother, Claudius. This intolerable act of regicide/fratricide is ironed over by the new powers-that-be in a speedblur of “efficiency,” “speed” and “progress.” Hamlet’s morbid despair is seen by the Court as a revolt against the rational progression of aristocratic succession, of “nature,” and of the narrative structure itself. These so-called rational adults in Hamlet’s world have distorted and (con)fused their capacity for reason with the impulsiveness of their desire. In doing so, they generate the damning psychic conditions which lead to Hamlet’s internal “crisis.” The real tragedy is that Hamlet’s crisis is diagnosed by an illegitimate power elite as a subjective, personal malady in need of a cure, rather than a reaction to the repugnant conditions that generated it.

I see this narrative as a microcosmic parallel to a much broader, much more complicated relationship between speed, rationality, desire, and crisis, one which Illich is criticizing in “Energy and Equity.” In the same way that the adults in “Hamlet” conceal the wreckage of a socio-political order that has been unraveled by their own corruption, hypocrisy and unchecked libidinal desire by focusing on Hamlet’s internal crisis, so too is the “energy crisis” typified with a “euphemistic term [which] conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion” (Illich, 2). In other words, the declaration of an “energy crisis” functions essentially as a mechanism of denial: mindless and indulgent habits of consumption go unchecked, uninterrupted, and uncontested in a libidinal economy, while a looming “energy crisis” legitimates rampant credit expansion, unsustainable urban and rural land-use patterns, exploitative markets for fuel, and the list goes on (see O’Connor, 243). As Illich puts it, “North American and [M]exican ideologues put the label of ‘energy crisis’ on their frustration, and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown is due…to the attempt of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people” (4). I suspect that it is because we continually fail (either out of learned or intentional ignorance) to distinguish between loaded semantic differences that we struggle to openly and critically confront the conditions that generate our real crisis: the simultaneous abandonment of hope for freedom as citizens and submission to the “iron cage” of the consumerist logos.

When Illich advocates for the kind of “technological maturity” that “permits a variety of political choices and cultures,” (5) he is also implicitly invoking the foundational values and principles upheld in the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. The social ills generated by uncurbed indulgence and submission to the “pleasure principle,” as it is termed in literature studies, could be checked by the decelerating processes of reason, thought, and conscience. Or, in the contextual terms of energy politics, the unabated growth of energy consumption could be countered through conscientious recognition and acceptance of a “socially critical threshold of…energy quantum” (Illich, 22). A society that harbours such a deep aversion to the notion of limits confines itself to a fate of maddening insatiability, while exporting the unlivable conditions of real crisis to other localities within the global network of unequal exchange. The political ideals of a participatory democracy – ideals which we claim are worthy of fighting for – cannot keep up with the unfettered acceleration of a burgeoning technocratic socio-political landscape. Only by reclaiming our freedoms as expressive, communicative, thoughtful and conscientious citizens can we hope to salvage the ideals of a truly progressive and prospering participatory democracy.

References:

Ivan Illich, “Energy and Equity” from Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

James O’Connor, “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” and “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” from Natural Causes. New York and London: Guildford Press, 1998.