The Image Consumes Life: The End of Days
By Dr. Eugene Narrett - October 3, 2011
The Postmodern era is one in which images consume and displace life. The phrase 'virtual reality' is used to denote and trivialize this process which grows more extreme with each advance of digital technology. "Technology" means the science of weaving or, more literally, "weaving words" the deceitful magic we call 'spin.' I have created the term, magike tekne, image-weaving to define contemporary poiesis which is the murderous and suicidal cultural project noted above.
This process can be observed and described operating at many levels of the social and global macrocosm and in all fields from finance to economics, to sports, fashion and geopolitics. These all demonstrate increasing artifice, inflation and inflated claims, language hollowed into ever more hollow slogans and the devaluation or suppression of history, memory and what is genuine. Image-making expresses itself through the media as a distraction machine dissembling its own management and purpose and blurring all distinctions, not least the distinction between reality and fiction. Today with have culturetainment that embraces – consumes ever more areas of life. The derivative, ersatz, fabricated and the lie outright displace the original and true as Esau strains to displace and bury Israel. This is a story as ancient as the formation of the West, the primary idyll being the lie that the Church is the 'real' Israel. This lie leads to numerous apocalypses and the sustained elegiac cultural phase of gigantism and decadence in which we live and must endure.
The process of idealization leads from its promise of beauty to horror as the image confronts the self with its allure and claims for good and sovereignty and the generating individual or culture experiences alienation and growing uncertainty. It is a Narcissus process that evinces a weak, betrayed or destroyed father, a dearth father ('Darth Vader') at its core. It seems like an Oedipus scenario but is more like the birth of Aphrodite from the severed genitals of Ouranos.
The splitting and deterioration that inheres in image work may be explicated by Kabala, particularly the structure of double letters, letters that may be pronounced hard or soft (depending on whether they have the dagesh vowel within them). These seven letters form the phrase begged k'prat[i] and include spatial, temporal, moral and qualitative dimensions that include every dimension of existence from the weather to finance to socio-political structure. Most importantly, their double nature emphasizes the dual, antithetical potential within each moment and presents a development model of history moving from disguise to fruitfulness (ripening and disclosure). In the inscriptive Hebrew model of history, the truth will out. It is, however, not deterministic but liable at any period to inversion and corruption such as we witness in our lives and is epitomized in the denaturing and revaluations of Postmodernism.
There is a balance in each day or period of the 'week' of history by which its alternative potential 'runs and returns' to its center; it is hard and then soft, like lightning and thunder, like a wave breaking on a beach and then hissing softly down into the sea again. Each day is a millennium (see Tehillim 90, "for a thousand years in Your eyes is like a bygone yesterday, like a watch in the night")and the millennia of history may be envisioned and read as a Menorah, right to left; the potential of each period being the flame of a candle. Beginning in wisdom and kindness, the process should achieve perfection in a kingdom of grace as the holy seed of letters is articulated by the mouth speaking peace to the far and near. But what we see is a new era of barbarism and State-sadism and deceit in which claims of peace enshroud a fog of perennial 'low-level' wars of contrived dialectic attrition and grace is perverted into horror masquerading as beauty, the essence of our screen world.
The dominion of imagery over life is the last stage of the corruption of all forms and values that is the signature of the modern period whose origin was in Britain about 1850.[ii] This period has seen numerous and increasingly frequent inflation, devaluation, and depression as economies are destroyed by finance and government gigantism and authoritarian control of life, lately disguised as compassion, therapies and enshrined in the terms "Welfare State" and 'government programs' funded by taxpayers who must feed government first. This primary but hidden welfare is a form of the image or fiction displacing and consuming its creator. The fiction that governments are created to serve men, rather than themselves and the power of a very few men and women is one of the enduring lies of the enlightenment. So wealth and reward (gimmel) becomes impoverishment in every facet of modern-postmodern life. ...
[i] Beit-Gimmel-Dalet-Kaf-Peh-Resh-Tav are the Hebrew letters spelled out above. Each Hebrew letter when pronounced sounds a word and this adds layers of significance to the articulation of the sefirot and all the letters in the myriad forms of existence. See Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (Boston 1997), chapter 4.
[ii] Already in 1853 Matthew Arnold wrote in The Scholar Gypsy of "this strange disease of modern life" filled with anxiety, doubt, fatigue and half-heartedness.
Dr. Narrett is available to lecture and his services are available as an editor or co-writer of fiction or non-fiction projects. For more information, you can contact Dr. Narrett via his website at:
http://israelendtimes.com/contact/
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jewish Eye.
Related Articles & Reviews:
Image-Work and Nietzsche's Critique of Wagner, by Dr. Eugene Narrett.
This essay investigates the nature of Esau and his relation to Ya'akov largely by means of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's wide-ranging critique of Wagner.
Sovereignty v Corruption; Integrity v Image, by Dr. Eugene Narrett.
This glare or image-formation and idol worship is darkness, a fundamental lie about life. In the shadows of the lie the world is filled with Hamas (“violence”)...
