Thursday, July 31, 2014

Nihilisms

The movie Snowpiercer is an excellent hypothetical take on what is necessary for us addicted to anarchy to visualize in general, that is, for us to visualize in terms of reality-as-negation under capitalist constraints. 

You have to get out. 
There is no internal solution. 

This is of course obvious; but not for anarcho-syndicalists or other liberals, or at least not to the degree that we consider capitalistic technocratic colonialism of wild animal bodies to be in need of total destruction. Against Bonnano we say theft in quantitative conditions is only more quantitative reality--such is hardly qualitative because one here adheres to some kind of productive activity, fully exploitative and on the backs of others too weak to seek a way out of this variation of quantitative life. For the negation of the conditions of reality is only sufficient for us if we remove ourselves (individually and therefore (perhaps) collectively) from our parasitism.

The plot takes us on a cruise to the realization that even if you get to the top you have to accept its conditions and that it is fixed. 

The shell and its internals.  

There is no new in the shell of the old; only the shell with different content, generating similar appearances in both cases, whether capitalism or communism. And here the point is picturesque. Even if the train were to be more just; if, say, Curtis were to carry out Equality via task rotation--a little bit of injustice some of the time for everyone so that there is a just whole; if all of that, the train being as it is simply repeats what the world is like. And what is the world like? The persyn at the head is always a terrible nihilist, a cruel indifferent bastard producing conditions of chaos so that the whole might adapt to its own excrement; producing the deaths of some, usually the worst off, but not necessarily, so that the whole might be maintained in its "integrity". 

This is closer to home than most of us wish to see. 
It doesn't offer a way out. 
For we love to consume the shit that we produce, disregarding originary natural production for an apparatus of our own shit. 
We permit our dreams to be recuperated, if we have any at all. The way the world is, is conceived to be the best of all possible worlds; the train puts this (quantitative, domesticated) quality in the tight light that it really is.

In the end, the train is derailed and the two last "hopes" of humanity, whom had created this reality for themselves via a bomb, leave the dirt that is train-civilization, and embark on a new reality, fully external, fully Outside (the train). It is not clear why fur coats would all of a sudden be sufficient in ridiculously cold temperatures, temperatures that had been earlier marked by dead snow-humyns that had once escaped; but perhaps death is better than this life...Perhaps there is an unspoken shift in reality that permits this move; perhaps, in a deeper register, these conditions are merely seemingly impossible and the entire point is allegorical. Clearly the explosion is not an act that destroys humanity (since two, perhaps more, survive). And since the avalanche wasn't intentional, the bomb exploding cannot be justifiably compared to the nihilism of Wilford, his revealed indifferent shrewd force as the man that runs the entire apparatus by way of a perpetual motion engine coupled to a young slave-child. The bomb is instead a persynal movement to shift ones' own reality, to create space Outside. 

This escaping-act is also importantly passive in the sense that these are kronos-addicts, neither rulers nor slaves, middle class privilege-keepers with some kind of access, yet with just enough knowledge to see this entire world as fucked. Anti-social nihilism here stands in subtle contrast to ruling nihilisms. The final scene depicts two persyns taking action to improve their own being; and with no-one to stand on in such a move, because the world has been left behind, that is to say, the direct link of exploitation has been completely negated, one is free from the obligation of giving a shit about anyone else but oneself and ones' friends and free from a sense that there is a degree to which mutual aid is caught under the sign of reciprocal use-value.

The point that I think Snowpiercer permits us to see is a  difference between nihilism in relation to ruling persyns and nihilism in relation to not falling for the need to overturn conditions, which can never be completely negated by the logic of rulership. That is to say, perhaps, if one fucks off from the conditions, one can be anti-social and simultaneously liberated from the obligation to other people and their needs.

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