Bla Bla Bla

 
Perhaps the only really moving speech in the twenty first century was given by Greta Thunberg, who characterized the official rhetoric around climate change – way around, whilst making as much money and as little change as possible – as bla bla bla. “Build better bla bla bla. Green economy bla  bla bla.” And, as she acutely said, we are drowning in the bla.

Not only is Thunberg correct about every speech by every politician in the past twenty to thirty years – in America from Mr.Bring it on to Mr. Hope to Ms. Break the glass ceiling (symbolically of course) to American first and  Mr. Build Back Better, and every one elsewhere, because frankly, the political class is the blab la bla class, leading us to the zombie apocalypse – but she was also obviously referencing Friedrich Kittler’s famous essay on Lacan, Dracula’s Legacy.

Well, who knows? But Kittler’s essay, which I decided to exercise my brain on – instead of crunching the news of the war in Ukraine, which is like eating shit every morning – does enter, crucially, into the nexus between the recording of the voice and what is brought by the voice – the signifier. Brought into our all too organic ear.
 
"If even Freud’s fundamental rule prescribes speaking at random [ins Blaue], if, further, the most directr way to the pleasure principle, without all those chin-ups “into higher spheres, as laid down by aristotelian ethics” leads to such bla bla , then nothing else will do. In order to tape blabla, magnetic tape, tv cameras and radio microsphones were invented.”

This is a harsh judgment, since we have long fancied that we are a society of facts, when all is said and done, a society that could not have invented magnetic tape or any of the rest of it if we had not a firmer foundation than bla bla. Or, as the first generation of Anglo analytic philosophers used to say, before digging into their disgusting English cuisine at the table in Oxford, nonsense. Nonsense, the magic wand.

Well, Greta and Kittler, I think, see through the nonsense crap. It is the sense, the infinite sensemaking and infinite denial, that is blabla. The most nonsensical of all events – the creating of an earth that will be hostile to the very lives of all the sensemakers – which is fully underway. In our imagination, the rich – who have been credited, with more blabla than even was accorded the apotheosis of Roman emperors, with being “creators”, when their only creation was administration and investment built on other people’s labor – get away. They build spaceships and get away. Or they will all go to Peter Thiel’s Treasure Island and eat lobster.

But will they catch the lobsters? And make the pots they boil them in? I don’t think so.  Bla bla then will eat like a cancer through their bones.  And all our bonery, as even a child, or teenager, can see. The pleasure principle, whip in hand, will take off its mask, then.

Such a price to pay - the nobel prize in economics was awarded to a special specimen of bla, William Nordhaus, who calculated that the extinction of the human race would be a loss of precisely 100 trillion dollars, although who exactly would lose that money, or what money means when there are no exchangers, is not a question for a University of Chicago raree show - and such ignobility and nonsense on our stumbling out of the exit.