It is not like people, sane people out of their own will, behave in a particular way, nor does this happen that people turn insane and behave insanely. This is the power of Ideology that the economic and social system shapes that People, start considering yesterday's sanity as insane and vice versa today.
We live in Post love hostels today. Strategically used words with precise meanings, I have tried to succinctly put what I want to say. Post love is a condition where Love in its raw openness is prohibited. Post love is a situation where Love, as a concept, can only survive behind a reversal of a defense, such as in humor twisted in Rom-coms, in horror twisted in lust, etc.
Post Love has some hidden assumptions.
First, Love is too mushy and cringy to be performative. So, its performance must be engendered, Like Judith Butler dictates, Gender is performative, out of many subjects, Love becomes a performance art for a particular gender. Women perform love in a particular way and you are trained to receive love from a woman in a trained particular way. If a woman deviates from the prescribed performance of love, you somehow judge the woman just like an Art critic judges a poem, "Oh! It is not in meter". Men have to perform Love in a particular way, or else, they will be judged for their performance. So, Love becomes a gendered genre of performance. What is love if not associated with any gender norm? nothing precisely. There is no concept of love which today can be called a Neuter gender love. Why is it so? I claim, this is the result of post-ideological trauma. We live in a post-ideological era. Although this is a false statement. No more than now we are engrossed in Ideology today, and no more than he is most ideological who claims that he belongs to "No -isms" and he comes from "No-wing". He actually comes from all wings and all ideologies fool him constantly. Since in the 20th century, horrors were committed in names of political ideologies, we have stopped claiming our ideologies today. As a result, calling yourself a liberal is frowned upon, a communist or otherwise is seen as a mark of "being too naive" or "a blind supporter" and being from a "no-winger" is considered the new intellectual. So, with this, comes a dishonesty towards society. Since the ideologies which claimed to offer help to the collectives as a whole are on a decline, A sudden Narcissistic rise of individuality is being seen. Individual with just a digital identity and stripped of all collective social relations is the new subject today. I call it, "The Techno-feudal Slave".
The Techno-feudal slave does not know love. He knows a product called, "Self-love". He has been sold that as a commodity. All other forms of love that he has somehow invented in his head are actually an extension of this Commodified "Self-love".
Self-love is the most fetishistic and undignified form of love possible. It is worse than lust, a traditionally considered heinous and unspiritual form of love is Physical love. Self-love is today's lust. Today's Techno-feudal slave is addicted to his own identity on digital forms of media. He is addicted to his own self Narcissistically. The pressure to be a self-made is so much in a rise which has led to a corresponding rise of mental health diseases, or depression. Depression is analogous in concept, with the Auto-immune diseases, where the Subject starts attacking his own allies, his own cells, his own self in a way. Depression occurs in a positivity obsessed society, where there is a pressure to be successful on your own, not because it is for a purpose, being successful itself has become a purpose to be successful. And more for the story. Man today, wants to become a story of his own success. The motivation to become successful has become this self-driving machine, where the sole motivation of becoming successful is motivation itself, no other reason. Someone wants to be successful so that he can motivate others to be successful. It is like a "Motivation Zombie Apocalypse".
So this Techno-feudal Slave, knowing no love but self-love and all other love as manifestations of self-love deprives itself from the social love that was the Zeitgeist of the last century. In the Last century, being a social activist, being a leader for a cause, or just someone who stands up for collective goodness was considered a Hero. It was considered the highest form of Love. Today, the most hated occupation is the people who protest, people who are activists, people who stand up for someone other's grievances, mostly people who still believe in the concept of "Helping Members of a society as your own Family."
Numerous UAPAs, numerous people in jails, journalists and all, and leaders calling the people who protest as "Andolan-Jeeves" or "People who earn and eat through revolutions". So, People have begun to equate Protestors with inefficient failures who could not achieve anything for themselves, so they started complaining. In a society where criticism and protest is constantly considered as a "false complain" or "nagging", This society is under the full attack of what Byung Chul Han calls "Psychopolitics" or the politics of Mental health. Politics where the social structures and economic structure enslaves you through having full control on your mental Healths. The Market controls your attention. The market will decide what you consider important and what you consider worthless. The Market will decide what you will feel when and when you will feel depressed. And Market will take away your rights to be left alone and non-attending by giving you lakhs of eyeballs in front of your screens and incentivising you to perform in front of Digital media. As if Market is the "Madari" and you are the Monkey who starts using Social media and post a picture of you enjoying life whenever Madari fansies. And the delusion that the Monkey lives is that he is doing it on its own. That it is his decision to post a picture, not the Market's.
When you are rewarded with eye-balls on the internet, and more so with some hearts occasionally, it is at this time that you are now incentivized more often to perform.
Second, Authentic love is too risky and dangerous to have in this economy. So the techno-feudal subject avoids it at all cost. Gone are the days when people used to die in love, People used to feel depressed in love. Today's subject avoids "falling" in love via two ways,
1. Falsely "Spiritualizing" love by making an idea out of it. Not acting on impulses, passions and just to fancy a woman and performing on Digital media by putting songs and other stuff. This digital performance still remains hollow, so it must be supplemented by Pseudo-spiritual correlations like, "I love her like I love God." Nobody loves God, first of all, And Nobody wishes to Fuck his god, since it is evident that loving her includes a violent and fascinating dimension of Sex.
2. They avoid falling by planning. People today, Plan for love. I call it the "Arranged love". Dating sites, Marriage apps, etc. Social media connections. All are manifestations of Arranged love. I claim, Post love is a society of Arranged love. There are no authentic love marriages anymore. Market has intervened. Now, either you let your parents decide (Conventional Arranged) or you let the market forces decide (Love-arranged by market). Both are equally bad and enslaving. Since what are parents but products of Market today. They will use their own parameters like Caste, Class etc. It is like planning to make a forest. You cannot plant a forest. However unorganized, your made-up forest will be a complexly made-up farm. It is an established fact that, Humans cannot make certain things in its human way. It is a work of nature's randomness, and it is supposed to be made so. For example, Love has and should occur in an accident, in a coincidence, in a way like slipping and falling and it should hurt. The Love was a product of nature in a way that love, like all products of nature, included in itself a loss of itself.
Like all products of nature, Like say, Water includes in itself thirst. If water, no thirst. If no water then thirst. Thirst is essential for water's subjective existence in Human's mind. Similarly, loss of love is an essential thing, all those violent reactions, emotional traumas, are an essential part of loving. That makes it a natural thing and not a market product.
A market always tries to sell you "The thing without its side-effects". Coffee without caffeine, Diet coke etc. "Love without falling in love" is this planned love.
Third, I consider is the most dangerous ideology of today's times. Love as in love for Pragmatism. Today's techno-feudal slave is an un-emotional hijacked plane being run on autopilot of optimizing success. Today's techno-feudal subject abhors making mistakes. And most of all, it abhors not making mistakes at the same time. Let me explain.
The tecno-feudal subject, as we dealt in last section, has heard enough number of motivational success stories and an equal share of failure stories. So, most of all, today's information addict Techno-feudal slave has more stories, more myths than any aboriginal society in this world. The fear psychosis of failure is greater today than any other fear psychosis of any religion of the past. No Devil haunts more than the Devil of failure to the Techno-feudal subject.
"I do not want to die a mediocre man", declares this slave, And not dying mediocre, in his mind has a specific meaning. it can be defined by clear cut tangible goals.
1. Significant social media presence and popularity.
2. Significant accolades in his field and recognition.
3. Significant material wealth to be able to afford a life worth a display on social media.
4. Significant personal relations to be displayed on social media in form of family vlogs, friend-blogs.
In essence, success means today what can be converted into a story, a story in the form of a digital content which will fetch eyeballs and views. A digital God they all worship, and the sacrifice they do is of their mental health. They kill their healthy mental self in making the Digital God of eyeballs happy.
For this pursuit, the greatest weapon of this Techno-feudal slave is "Pragmatism" and "Utilitarianism".
Anyone who is attached to fixed morals and principles is considered today a dogmatic person. Since when you believe firmly on fixed objective principles, You declare, "Ok, if I am going to suffer for my honesty, let it be. If I am going to suffer for my principles, so be it."
But, then how these success goals will be met? They should be met. So, the techno-feudal subject adopts pragmatism as his new ideology. Pragmatism began from America. America, a market which decided to call itself a country. Any one de-ontological is dogmatic today. Why so? A Gandhi is disliked today not for his interpretation of Hinduism in liberal terms, or for his conservative stances, but for his firmness towards certain principles of life and struggle and to accept defeat even while walking on the path of truth.
For Gandhi, the path of truth must equally be true and in this philosophical sense, merely walking on the path towards truth was like victory of truth already. But today, Gandhi is the hated one. Communalists hate him. Seculars hate him subconsciously. Conservatives hate him, liberals hate him. Nobody loves this man because this man was one of the examples who can beat the current hegemonic idea of "Pragmatism", "Success mania" and "Victory at any cost".
So, third point is understood. In post-love societies Love exists in three forms.
1. Self-love or Digital narcissism.
2. Arranged Love or a planned artificial forest.
3. Pragmatic love or love for Pragmatism.
In these scenarios, where our most sacred concepts like, Love are commodified. We can no longer trust our own common sense what we perceive as love. It is natural, then, that the new Generations, GenZ and Gen Alpha, which I consider most honest generations till date, have coined new terms which sound similar to love but not exactly love. This I think is the symptom of the malaise that the Neo-liberal techno-feudal market has created.
Situationship is an honest symptom of something deeply grave. I think an honest person today will have situationships only. Marriages are farce in this day and age. They are not outdated, but they are too commodified to be true. They are fake. You do not need to say, "Fake marriage". When you say, Marriage, that means "a fake relationship".
Relationships are too, now commodified. Live-in relationships are commodified. Everything is build around this Economy of Post-love where the attempt of the market is to bring hyper-certainty. You are not allowed to be unsure about love. But this uncertainty is in a way, a pre-requisite for love. If you are not anxious about your to be partner, the one who you wish to be with your whole life, you are not really in a process of being in love. Ideally, the anxiety of "What will happen" should drive the feeling of love. The "What will happen" should naturally be converted into "Whatever will, we will see together".
But, today's post-love societies are societies where economy just wants you to keep Posting about love. Do not fall in love. Never experience the actual thing. Never try to actually meet a person, a random stranger, not through social media, talk and keep meeting and then develop affection and then fight, and then feel sad, then after break-ups, feel depressed. This is how naturally these things occur. This is actually Love occurs when left untouched. But, today the man is scared too much. Hence the Secure version that Market provides,
"The Anxiety less, The trauma less, The depression less, The fall-less form of love"
A Love worth posting on social media. That is post-love. It is exactly not what it is advertised. It is not love but just a hollow advertisement of love.
That is why, Love, in my opinion, should be frowned upon the most today. anyone who says, he regards Love the most. Consider him either delusional, already brainwashed by digital economy, or a sinister, a predator, someone who can actually make content out of your highly regarded relationship.
What is the solution? Is there a genuine way to express affection today. Here, in loss of newer ideas, I am forced to return to some old conservative ideas. Some ideas which are now considered bad. Some ideas which are considered even not sane today, but symptomatic.
For instance, "Neki kar dariya mein Daal" or "Do good and do not post on social media".
For instance, "Do something that expresses affection and do not ask for payment", and Also, what goes without saying, "Do not post on social media".
What to not post on social media? Anything. I mean anything that makes a commodity out of your own life is post-love and not love.
I consider, at last, that our parent's generation of absent love is a love to be practiced now a days. Our parents were never present in our memories loving us, or saying that "Beta, I love you!" because they were busy providing us with resources that made us live a good life, something that they will never be alive to see. Something that they will never boast on social media by posting. Our fathers, Our mothers knew what is love. They might not be aware that they know. But they know. It is in them. Programmed by nature or conditioned by society, whatever you say, but it is there.
Return to old love. "Love as practice of giving", "Love as fall", "Love as which does not exclude the possibility of loss".
Love that cries, sings, writes poems, dances imagining her in his arms, dreams to have kids with her, dreams to cook for her, but never never never and I repeat, never ever dreams to post his love online.
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